Comment 0 for bug 1815483

Availability
============
Built for all supported architectures. In sync with Debian.

Rationale
=========
libhandy is an extension of GTK3 to allow for so-called responsive design or reactive layout. libhandy is developed by Purism which aims to produce a phone running a complete free software stack. Purism wants to enable a form of GNOME to run on the phone as an option (KDE Plasma and even Ubuntu Touch may be available later too).

Ubuntu 19.04's gnome-control-center 3.31.90 includes an embedded copy of libhandy. As we do with other libraries, it would be nice to transition to a shared library instead. The Ubuntu Desktop team believes it is reasonable to use the embedded copy for 19.04 so there isn't urgency for this MIR.

Besides gnome-control-center, the universe apps gnome-contacts and gnome-games-app alse use libhandy. I expect more Ubuntu main apps will use libhandy in the future.

Security
========
No known security issues

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/source-package/libhandy
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libhandy/+cve

Quality assurance
=================
- Ubuntu Desktop bugs needs to be subscribed

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libhandy
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=libhandy
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libhandy/issues

There is an autopkgtest passing on all architectures to test C compiling of a minimal libhandy app.

The upstream test suite is run during the build using dh_auto_test.

https://autopkgtest.ubuntu.com/packages/libh/libhandy
https://ci.debian.net/packages/libh/libhandy/

Dependencies
============
All dependencies for the library are in main.

The -dev package depends on libgladeui (part of the glade source) which used to be in main until we allowed universe Build-Depends shortly before Ubuntu 16.04 LTS's release.

glade is old enough that it never had a MIR in Launchpad.

libhandy does provide a build option for the Glade catalog feature. It feels like it would be really useful to developers to have libhandy support in the Glade app (or in GNOME Builder which now offers Glade editing.) Glade is a GUI tool for building user interfaces for GTK apps (instead of needing to code them manually with XML or your favorite programming language).

So my preference order is #1 Promote Glade or at least libgladeui to main, #2 Keep the libhandy -dev package out of main, #3 Disable Glade support for libhandy.

Standards compliance
====================
4.1.3, debhelper compat 11, simple dh7 style rules

Maintenance
===========
Maintained in Debian by one of the Purism libhadny developers

https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/libhandy
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libhandy

Other Info
==========
At a recent GTK hackfest, moving some of libhandy's functionality into GTK4 was discussed. It's trickier to do that with GTK3 since GTK3 is supposed to be in stable mode since 2016.

https://blog.gtk.org/2019/02/08/report-from-the-gtk-hackfest-in-brussels/

The library is under heavy development:
https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libhandy/wikis/home

https://honk.sigxcpu.org/projects/libhandy/doc/