[MIR] limba

[Robert Ancell]

[Availability]
In Universe

[Rationale]
Required for GNOME Software (MIR in bug 1536870).

[Security]

[Quality assurance]
No open bugs in Debian or Ubuntu.

[Dependencies]
All in main

[Standards compliance]
No known issues

[Maintenance]
Will be maintained in Debian.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

Discussed with Matthias Klump (ximion) about if it made sense to split the plugins out of the gnome-software binary package:
<robert_ancell> ximion, Do you have any plans to split the gnome-software package into subpackages for plugins? Asking mostly because it seems a waste of time to put limba into main
<ximion> robert_ancell: I currently want to explicitly avoid doing that, since it will result in some people having fwupd support, some have Limba support and some have xdg-app support or any combination of these...
<robert_ancell> ximion, yeah, it wasn't clear to me how you'd divide them up either.
<ximion> those different featuresets would result in making it pretty hard to rely on stuff
<ximion> robert_ancell: I thought about this a bit, since I saw that issue coming, and decided that I would like to avoid splitting out plugins - GS not knowing about modules can be a prblem on it's own
<ximion> (GS makes the components, Limba, fwupd and soon xdg-app visible, if it starts without them users will wonder why GS is not showing the app they just installed, until they notice that gnome-software-plugin-xdg-app is missing)
 also, which plugins should be split out is another complicated question

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

There's a system daemon as well as a setuid binary, so I'm going to put this onto security for a quick look first.

Robert, as for breaking gnome-software into modules, I get why Debian doesn't want to. But Ubuntu can separately patch out or in support for backends to offer one . I imagine we'll patch in snappy or click support?

Maybe it makes sense to patch out support for the less popular backends or ones we're less interested in.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

Agreed we can patch out backends if we want. It comes down to the cost of having limba in main versus the packaging diff.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

We've decided to ship GNOME Software with limba disabled.

[Matthias Klumpp (ximion)]

Meh... I suppose splitting the plugin out and putting it into universe is not possible, since you need to build-depend on Limba...
An alternative is to rebuild that part and possibly other plugins in universe, which would essentially mean two GNOME Software copies in the archive, which is also a bit ugly...

Looks like my only option will be to provide a PPA to make this work well.