Package: epiphany-browser
Version: 48.3-2
Severity: wishlist
Tags: forky sid
X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected], [email protected]

While updating epiphany-browser to version 48.5 I noticed that it is
compiled with libgranite (src:granite-7), which does desktop-specific
things if running under elementaryOS's Pantheon desktop environment.

Debian is not elementaryOS, and we do not have Pantheon packaged.
src:granite-7 has been orphaned: its GTK 3 equivalent was originally
packaged by Ubuntu's Devid Antonio Filoni (presumably for the Budgie
desktop environment?), but all uploads since 2018 have been by Boyuan
Yang, who orphaned it in 2022 and has been doing periodic QA uploads
since then.

I noticed this because the new epiphany-browser fixes two crash bugs
when running under Pantheon with the libgranite feature enabled, which
have been there since the GTK 4.17/4.18 cycle (back in March),
suggesting that this is not a well-tested code path.

epiphany-browser is actually the only thing in the archive that depends
on the GTK-4-based library granite-7 at the moment - all the other
packages that use libgranite are still on GTK 3 and libgranite v6.

I think we should consider disabling the feature in the first upload of epiphany-browser to forky, to limit the blast radius of any integration
bugs. We can easily re-enable it if someone actually packages Pantheon
in Debian.

(For maximum confusion, GTK 4 directly depends on libgraphene and
indirectly depends on libgraphite, neither of which is directly related
to libgranite; when assessing the dependency tree please be
extra-careful you are talking about the right /^libgra.*/ library! While writing this bug report, I wrote libgraphite when I meant libgranite
several times.)

smcv

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