Source: gnome-shell-extensions-extra Version: 20230205-2 Severity: serious Justification: unsupportable Tags: sid bookworm X-Debbugs-CC: debian-gtk-gn...@lists.debian.org
gnome-shell-extensions-extra is a new collection of 6 different source packages bundled into a single source package with a single binary package. - There is no upstream that bundles these extensions together like this. - There is no unifying theme for why these extensions are included and why others are not included, except perhaps these extensions are useful to the Maintainer. - It is not possible to use apt to determine the upstream version number for these extensions. - It is not possible to use uscan to check for new upstream releases - It is not easily possible for the Security Team to determine whether security bugs and fixes apply to this package. - There is a namespace concern. Since the GNOME project officially maintains something called "gnome-shell-extensions", it is possible they may eventually produce something called "gnome-shell-extensions-extra" as they have done with "gnome-themes-extra". - Twice per year, GNOME releases a new major version of GNOME Shell which breaks all GNOME Shell extensions until they are manually updated for the new release. It upsets users when their packaged GNOME Shell extensions silently no longer work because of a GNOME Shell update. Therefore, the Debian GNOME team has a best practice of specifying the GNOME Shell versions an extension works with, in the package dependencies set in debian/control for each extension so that apt will warn the user of extensions that are not compatible yet with the new release. I personally verified that this was in place for all the independently packaged extensions in Debian Testing for the GNOME 44 release. This package does not have these relations in debian/control and cannot. This becomes an unmaintainable mess when a new major GNOME Shell version is prepared for Debian Unstable. I am initially filing this bug as Serious because I believe the current packaging is unsupportable and violates paragraph 5(a) of https://release.debian.org/testing/rc_policy.txt On behalf of the Debian GNOME team, Jeremy Bícha
