Source: audacious Severity: normal Tags: sid bullseye Control: block 895291 by -1 User: pkg-utopia-maintain...@lists.alioth.debian.org Usertags: dbus-glib-deprecation
dbus-glib is a deprecated D-Bus library with some significant design flaws, and is essentially unmaintained. I would like to minimize its use, and eventually remove it from Debian. There will not be a version that fixes its design flaws, because that would be a major compatibility break, and any user of dbus-glib who is willing to port their application to a newer, incompatible version should instead be porting their application to a better D-Bus implementation such as GDBus. For most purposes, the recommended replacement for dbus-glib is the GDBus family of APIs in GLib, found in <gio/gio.h>. This does not add an additional dependency, because dbus-glib already depends on a sufficiently new version of GLib. A porting guide is available in the GLib documentation: <https://developer.gnome.org/gio/stable/ch35.html>. Practical examples of porting from dbus-glib to GDBus can be found in the git history of most older GNOME applications. Alternatives to GDBus, with different design emphasis and trade-offs, include sd-bus (systemd's D-Bus implementation), QtDBus (Qt's D-Bus API), and libdbus (the low-level reference D-Bus implementation). Please contact the D-Bus mailing list <dbus at lists.freedesktop.org> if you are unsure which D-Bus implementation is most suitable for a particular package. Some libraries expose dbus-glib as part of their API/ABI, in which case removing the deprecated dependency requires breaking API/ABI (telepathy-glib is a good example). For these libraries, maintainers should talk to the dependent library's upstream developers about whether the dependent library should break API/ABI and switch to GDBus, or whether the dependent library should itself be deprecated. In a few cases, the package uses the reference D-Bus library libdbus for all D-Bus-related APIs, and only uses dbus-glib as a way to connect libdbus to the GLib main loop: if the only functions referenced from dbus-glib are dbus_connection_setup_with_g_main() and dbus_server_setup_with_g_main(), then you are in this situation. The recommended replacement in this case is to bundle the dbus-gmain branch from the dbus-glib git repository, for example as a `git subtree` or `git submodule`. For example, dbus-python's GLib integration now works like this. See <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus-glib/blob/dbus-gmain/README .md> for more details.
