#1112231 mp3splt-gtk: Depends on deprecated dbus-glib

Package:
mp3splt-gtk
Source:
mp3splt-gtk
Description:
split MP3, Ogg Vorbis, or FLAC files without re-encoding
Submitter:
Simon McVittie
Date:
2026-04-24 10:39:04 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#1112231#5
Date:
2025-08-27 16:27:30 UTC
From:
To:
mp3splt appears to depend on dbus-glib (libdbus-glib-1-dev,
libdbus-glib-1-2).

Looking at codesearch.debian.net, this appears to be because it uses
dbus-glib in the GTK version to remote-control Audacious. Perhaps that
feature could be disabled, or ported to a better D-Bus implementation
like GDBus?

dbus-glib is a long-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://docs.gtk.org/gio/migrating-gdbus.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).

    smcv

#1112231#12
Date:
2025-12-09 08:49:56 UTC
From:
To:

#1112231#19
Date:
2026-04-24 10:36:29 UTC
From:
To:
Control: severity -1 important

I'm raising the bug reports for remaining uses of dbus-glib to important
severity. It's now been 11 years since dbus-glib was documented as
deprecated in its own NEWS file, and it hasn't got any better-quality or
more-maintained since then.

It might be useful to note that since the initial MBF in 2018, the
migration guide from dbus-glib to GDBus has moved to
<https://docs.gtk.org/gio/migrating-gdbus.html>.

     smcv