Dear Maintainer,

Support for HEIF thumbnail generation has been introduced as a Depends
on the gnome-control-center package in this commit:
https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/gnome-control-center/-/commit/2680a789e11e23b598fd083d202150098317bbf4

To fix this Debian bug:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=981757

This makes the distribution of GNOME difficult for Debian Blends that
want to avoid distributing the H265 codec library as it can be
problematic.

Since there are no hard build dependencies on HEIF, I would suggest
to move the following two dependencies from Depends to Recommends:

- heif-gdk-pixbuf
- heif-thumbnailer

This way one can skip HEIF support by using the --no-install-recommends
option.

See also this bug for more context on the listed dependencies and the
original need for HEIC thumbnails:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=981538

Thanks,

Agathe.

Those dependencies are no longer needed in Unstable and Testing since
gdk-pixbuf handles that format via glycin (but only for Debian release
architectures; ports still need the third-party gdk-pixbuf and
thumbnailer packages). The Debian GNOME team hasn't decided yet how it
wants to handle these packages.

It sounds like you might want this fixed for Debian 13 too? In that
case, we still need to do something for Unstable first.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha

Hello,

(I intended to open this bug with this email address; don’t be
surprised it just changed)

Good to know. I might have to investigate wether glycin pulls h265 for
my current usecase, but this is a me problem. :)

Correct, this is why I have proposed the following PR for unstable
first:
https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/gnome-control-center/-/merge_requests/77

The infrastructure for getting this change into trixie proposed-updates
seems to be in place on Salsa, so this might be a good candidate if the
fix seems fair.

Thanks.

Agathe.