gnome-system-tools is no longer maintained by the GNOME project. Its
most recent release was in 2010 and its most recent git commit was in
2012. Its dependencies liboobs and system-tools-backends do not appear
to be maintained by their previous upstream developers either.

In GNOME 3, the closest equivalent of gnome-system-tools is
gnome-control-center, which uses different libraries and services
(for example it alters the properties of user login accounts via
AccountsService, and does networking by configuring NetworkManager and
BlueZ).

Because gnome-system-tools and the stack around it carry out sysadmin
tasks, they are likely to be security-sensitive. I don't think they
should be in Debian without someone (possibly the same person as their
Debian maintainer) taking on the upstream maintainer role.

If you intend to be the upstream maintainer of gnome-system-tools
and its dependencies, please fork it and host upstream source code,
bug tracking etc. in some stable location. To avoid misrepresenting the
status of this package, it would also be a good idea to rename the fork
to something that doesn't imply that GNOME is still responsible for it.

The package's Description also seems misleading: in particular it is
no longer true that it has "Full integration with the new GNOME Control
Center".

    smcv

Thank you for this notice. I will try to find a way and handle this
situation ASAP, it's really complicated one, I cannot disagree.

Thank you for this notice. I will try to find a way and handle this
situation ASAP, it's really complicated one, I cannot disagree.

Hello,

The python2 removal efforts are upon us and with that gnome-doc-utils
is about to get removed (as it has been superseeded by yelp a very long
time ago so porting gnome-doc-utils isn't considered at all).

The gnome-system-tools package is basically the sole remaining blocker
for this now and it needs active effort to get ported over to yelp.
Discussion about this in #947530

A plan for how gnome-system-tools is going to maintained is desperately
needed at this point. As there has been no followup on the above 2 year
old message it's unclear to me if such a plan exists, but my impression
is that very little has happened in the past 2 years despite many
outstanding really bothersome bug reports against this package.

If a plan is not presented very soon it looks like the only viable
option is to finally file a RoQA: RM bug report to get
gnome-system-tools removed from the archive, which I'm going to do
unless there's any evidence of active maintenance.

I've already notified the sole remaining reverse-dependency,
parl-desktop, in #888675. I'm also CCing the reverse recommends
which should either drop their recommends or need to step up
and help out if they want to see gnome-system-tools package
continue to be available in the debian archive.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson

I'm not sure what query you used to find reverse-dependencies, but
src:debian-design (design-desktop) is also affected. I've pinged its
bug #888676 and raised the severity to serious.

    smcv@coccia ~ % dak rm -R -n gnome-system-tools
    Will remove the following packages from unstable:

    gnome-system-tools |    3.0.0-8 | source, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el, s390x
    gnome-system-tools | 3.0.0-8+b1 | amd64

    Maintainer: Andriy Grytsenko <andrej@rep.kiev.ua>

FTR I only looked at packages in testing, which is why I missed
debian-design.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson

    Hello Andreas!

You have written on Sunday, 26 January, at 10:36:

Mea culpa. Got too cluttered with real life events and completely forgot
about this issue. I think it's a time to get to it ASAP, this time for
real. This week I plan to investigate which way is better to solve this
issue and then solve it. I think 10 days should be enough but I hope to
fix it faster than that.

I'm sorry for being so late with that.

With best regards,
Andriy.

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
gnome-system-tools, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 888670@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Andriy Grytsenko <andrej@rep.kiev.ua> (supplier of updated gnome-system-tools package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2020 15:10:47 +0200
Source: gnome-system-tools
Binary: gnome-system-tools gnome-system-tools-dbgsym
Architecture: source amd64
Version: 3.0.0-9
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Andriy Grytsenko <andrej@rep.kiev.ua>
Changed-By: Andriy Grytsenko <andrej@rep.kiev.ua>
Description:
 gnome-system-tools - Cross-platform configuration utilities
Closes: 829836 888670 947530
Changes:
 gnome-system-tools (3.0.0-9) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * Bump Standards-Version to 4.5.0.
   * Replace http:// with https:// (lintian suggestion).
   * Use yelp instead of gnome-doc-utils (Closes: #947530, #829836).
   * Setup origin and GIT sources and update description (Closes: #888670).
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Hello,

The new repository[1] that was supposedly fixing this bug report
doesn't even include the upstream sources (or their git history).
It's a plain packaging repo with only the debian/ directory.
I don't see how that's supposed to fulfil the need for you to
become your own uptream. You most likely want to create a fork
from the archived gnome repo[2].

Also please pick a (new) name for your fork as it's *not* THE
gnome-system-tools (anymore), unless you actually talk to the gnome
project to officially pick up as the gnome maintainer (but I suspect
at this point there's absolutely no interest from the gnome project to
have gnome-system-tools revived).

(Once a proper upstream fork exists, packaging that under the new name
and providing a transitional gnome-system-tools meta-package will give
current users a seemless upgrade experience.)

(Please also make sure to look into all the deprecated notices that is
being spit out during build. Those will likely become an issue in the
not too distant future. But first you might want to reconsider if you
really have the resources for taking on the task of becoming your own
upstream.)

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson

[1]: https://github.com/LStranger/gnome-system-tools-debian
[2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/gnome-system-tools

    Hello!

You have written on Friday, 14 February, at 20:39:

Homepage: https://github.com/LStranger/gnome-system-tools

I had a hope that it's enoungh. From your message it seems it's not.

I understand that it's possible but it would need creating new package
and removing old one, thus involve some DD and some ftpmaster as well.
I'm still just a DM so did what is available for me to do. Thank you for
an advice, I'll decide how I can handle all this situation.

Yes, I understand all this said and, frankly speaking, I really have not
enough resources to handle this whole bunch (it also includes liboobs and
system-tools-backends) but unfortunately there is no another standalone
GTK tool to manage users and date/time around, it was a whole reason why
I've picked up this package in the first place. And as a LXDE maintainer,
I cannot leave LXDE users without means to manage users and date/time.
It's a pretty hard and problematic dilemma I have here, unless I start to
write appropriate tools from scratch by myself but that would take a lot
of time as well and this is also a problem. Well, as for LXDE I hope to
handle date/time management by the panel indicator later (and actually it
is almost never required as most of decent systems does not need manual
managing due to NTP in action) but users still cannot be handled without
this package. So in short, if I found some standalone tool to manage
users then I would be very glad to get rid of these three packages.

With best regards,
Andriy.

All the same considerations apply to liboobs and system-tools-backends,
which are also former GNOME projects. Taking over as upstream developer
of gnome-system-tools doesn't really make sense unless you do the same
for those two packages.

Again, consider whether you have the resources to maintain these. At this
point they have at least a decade of technical debt since the last time
they were actively maintained. In particular, they depend on dbus-glib,
which has been obsolete since the addition of GDBus to GLib in 2010.

Nothing else seems to depend on any of this family of packages, so
if you do take them over, combining the former gnome-system-tools,
system-tools-backends and liboobs packages into one big source tree
is likely to be simpler than keeping them separate.

    smcv

Nothing has changed in the new upstream project since it was created.
Not even the existing Debian patches were imported.
So the original assumptions still hold for the fork.