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.

Control: tags -1 + patch

Please apply
<https://salsa.debian.org/debian-ayatana-team/libayatana-appindicator/-/merge_requests/5>.
I've confirmed using diffoscope that it does not affect the contents of
the built packages.

Thanks,
     smcv

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

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
libayatana-appindicator, 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 955911@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> (supplier of updated libayatana-appindicator 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: Sun, 10 May 2026 13:25:49 +0100
Source: libayatana-appindicator
Architecture: source
Version: 0.5.94-1.1
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Ayatana Packagers <pkg-ayatana-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org>
Changed-By: Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>
Closes: 955911 1117668 1131260
Changes:
 libayatana-appindicator (0.5.94-1.1) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * Non-maintainer upload
 .
   [ Mike Gabriel ]
   * debian/control: Add more Multi-Arch: {same,foreign} declarations.
     Thanks, Multi-Arch Hinter.
 .
   [ Simon McVittie ]
   * d/patches/series: Apply the patch.
     This file was present in the 0.5.94-1 upload to the archive, but
     not in the packaging git repo.
   * d/control: Use ${gir:Depends} in -dev package instead of hard-coding.
     This avoids mistakes, and will make it easier to implement the <!nogir>
     build-profile at a later date, if desired.
   * d/control: Add ${gir:Provides} to -dev package.
     This ensures that it will provide the appropriate systematic name
     derived from its .gir file, and signals that it was not built with
     GObject-Introspection disabled (which is not currently set up,
     but could be added later via the nogir build-profile).
   * d/control: Explicitly build-depend on gir1.2-*-dev packages.
     These virtual package names can be mechanically derived from the uses
     of --include=GObject-2.0 and --include=Gtk-3.0 in the build system,
     and are the preferred way to ensure that the required GIR XML is
     present at build-time.
   * d/control: Drop obsolete B-D on libgirepository1.0-dev.
     This transitional package can't be multiarch-friendly for historical
     reasons. In this package, its only value was to pull in the code
     generation tools and GLib's own GIR XML, but those are now depended
     on via gobject-introspection and gir1.2-gobject-2.0-dev respectively.
     (Closes: #1131260)
   * d/control: Drop obsolete B-D on libdbus-glib-dev (Closes: #955911)
 .
   [ Helmut Grohne ]
   * Fix FTCBFS: Disable gtkdoc in the arch-only build (Closes: #1117668)
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 4476f1a12bf849cbccaa494fcacafd145682676d 19244 libayatana-appindicator_0.5.94-1.1.debian.tar.xz
 74985146b6e5235158fb0fb570e35b3e00dd43bd 17366 libayatana-appindicator_0.5.94-1.1_source.buildinfo
Checksums-Sha256:
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 cb5abfb54203a849596a362ee61415c437534a3c39b3be503611ad37517c8ba3 19244 libayatana-appindicator_0.5.94-1.1.debian.tar.xz
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Files:
 090b3f51db3a98f9986c9e59ad18a3e5 2722 libs optional libayatana-appindicator_0.5.94-1.1.dsc
 f0c9a50b88bbcf8c701069f48b4e645b 19244 libs optional libayatana-appindicator_0.5.94-1.1.debian.tar.xz
 4790f03f1e00c35720b9af7cd63a9f0b 17366 libs optional libayatana-appindicator_0.5.94-1.1_source.buildinfo
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