Dear Maintainer,

I have a google account added via gnome-online accounts. As of teh latest update, I am not able to mount teh remote location from teh file manager as I used to do.

I receive the message Unable to access "name of the location" Location is not mountable.

I do not know if this is due to bug #1110399

Happy to provide more info.

Cheers

Mike

Control: retitle -1 gvfs-backends: Google Drive backend was removed
Control: severity -1 wishlist
Control: tags -1 + upstream
...

Yes it is. Unfortunately, the Google Drive backend requires some
unmaintained libraries (libsoup2.4 and libgdata), so it was switched off
after the Debian 13 release. It is not feasible to provide long-term
security support for the required libraries, so they are very likely to
be removed from Debian during the Debian 14 cycle.

In <https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gvfs/-/merge_requests/266> (which is
the upstream equivalent of that change), they say:

     If people miss the Google Drive integration, we suggest that the
     Google Drive part of libgdata could be split into a separate library
     and ported to libsoup3 for use by gvfs.

If that happens, then the Google Drive backend can be re-enabled.

     smcv

On Wed, 27 Aug 2025 13:27:32 +0100 Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> wrote:
latest update, I am not able to mount teh remote location from teh file
manager as I used to do.
off
to



Agreed that there is not much that can be done Debian side... except
probably adding a Debian NEWS file and entry, and probably plan an
entry in the Debian 14 release note.

Maybe this bug should be split into keeping adding back the feature as
wishlist, and documenting the regression as a normal bug?
is
library



Alban

Sorry this should have been in the previous answer about the removal of
google drive gvfs backend.

Shouldn't a bug be opened against gnome-online-account/gnome-control-
center so as to have it stop showing or disabling the switch to enable
google drive in the UI? And no have the entry for google drive show up
in nautilus but not working?

Cheers,

Alban

Could you report that issue upstream?
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-online-accounts/-/issues

GNOME might not handle that removal for upgraders automatically (but
you can ask them with an issue against gvfs). Debian has a helper,
user-session-migration, that can do clean up tasks like this. Could
you open a new Debian gvfs bug for this?

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha

Oh, it looks like the Nautilus sidebar bookmark goes away if you
disable "Files" for the Google provider in Online Accounts. So maybe
both those issues can be fixed at the same time in
gnome-online-accounts upstream.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha