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: 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

Le vendredi 24 avril 2026, 12:36:29 heure d’été d’Europe centrale Simon McVittie a écrit :

Hi Simon,

regarding telepathy-qt, yes this package should really be RMed.
KDE software doesn’t depend on it so I just orphaned it (#1134818) and moved it to the debian salsa group.

I’m copying the UBports team since they still have lomiri packages depending on it so you can further discuss with them if needed.

I’m not really interested in the outcome, so please don’t keep me copied to this thread if discussion is to continue here. :)


Happy hacking,
--
Aurélien