• Bug#1109429: unblock: gnome-software/48.3-2

    From Simon McVittie@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jul 17 16:10:01 2025
    XPost: linux.debian.maint.gtk.gnome, linux.debian.devel.release

    Package: release.debian.org
    Severity: normal
    X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
    Control: affects -1 + src:gnome-software
    User: [email protected]
    Usertags: unblock

    I would like an unblock for gnome-software to be considered once it has
    had a few more days to bake in unstable - I'm opening the unblock bug
    now so I don't forget, and so that we can make a go/wait/no-go decision
    with as much information available to us as possible. I'm sorry this is happening so late, I am not a primary maintainer of this high-visibility package but nobody else from the team has been able to devote much time
    to it recently.

    This can be deferred to 13.1 by turning this into a trixie-pu request if
    the release team would prefer.

    [ Reason ]

    - New upstream bugfix release
    - Stop advertising outdated software as a recommendation
    - Annoy our users less with software-update notifications

    [ Impact ]

    If not accepted:

    #1100084 (one-line packaging change): the "Editor's Choice" panel will
    continue to appear in the UI, recommending a mixture of core GNOME apps
    that we still recommend (but which are preinstalled by the desktop task
    and therefore usually somewhat pointless to advertise like this) and
    outdated GNOME apps that are dead upstream or heading that way (which we
    should stop recommending). This is misleading at best: we have no
    "editor" who has chosen these. Ideally we should come up with a better
    list for Debian 14 and maybe backport it as a 13.x stable update, but
    I am not able to deliver a consensus on what our "editors" have chosen
    on my own, and just hiding the panel seems more suitable for 13.0.

    gnome-software#2856, gnome-software#2815 (cherry-picks from unreleased
    upstream gnome-48 stable branch): notification popups about updating apt metadata and packages are more insistent than they ought to be, and in particular will often pop up during suspend from resume.

    gnome-software#2853: app sometimes crashes with a use-after-free during shutdown.

    [ Tests ]

    Manual testing:

    - #1100084: after killing all gnome-software processes,
    `rm -fr ~/.cache/gnome-software` and re-launching it, the "Editor's
    Choice" panel is no longer shown.
    - gnome-software#2856, gnome-software#2815: I can suspend and resume
    while running the gnome-software frontend without getting a popup.
    I haven't tested what happens when a machine is left for 7 days without
    updating anything, because the quickest I can do that is 7 days :-)
    - gnome-software#2853: not tested, I'm unsure how to test the relevant
    code path on-demand.

    [ Risks ]

    Key package in our default desktop environment, presumably commonly
    depended-on as a source of security updates, and high-visibility.

    After mitigating #1100084 by disabling the "Editor's Choice" panel, gnome-software logs "Gs Only 0 apps for curated list, hiding" during
    startup, which might annoy users. (We could patch it to push that
    message down to debug level so it won't be shown by default, if
    desired.)

    If fixing gnome-software#2856 and gnome-software#2815 causes update notifications to be skipped when the app should have been reminding the
    user to update, we won't find that out for a while.

    [ Checklist ]

    [x] all changes are documented in the d/changelog
    [x] I reviewed all changes and I approve them
    [x] attach debdiff against the package in testing
    (filtered to exclude translations and patches; the changes to
    upstream source that were made by the patches are included in
    the diff)

    unblock gnome-software/48.3-2

    debdiff *.dsc | filterdiff -p1 -x'po/*.po' -x'debian/patches/*.patch' >| gnome-software_48.3-2.diff

    diff -Nru gnome-software-48.2/data/metainfo/org.gnome.Software.metainfo.xml.in gnome-software-48.3/data/metainfo/org.gnome.Software.metainfo.xml.in
    --- gnome-software-48.2/data/metainfo/org.gnome.Software.metainfo.xml.in 2025-06-02 10:33:10.000000000 +0100
    +++ gnome-software-48.3/data/metainfo/org.gnome.Software.metainfo.xml.in 2025-06-27 07:43:58.000000000 +0100
    @@ -66,6 +66,19 @@
    Validate with `appstreamcli validate *.metainfo.xml`
    -->
    <releases>
    + <release date="2025-06-27" version="48.3" type="stable">
    + <description>
    + <p>This is a stable release with the following change:</p>
    + <ul>
    + <li>Fix crash on application shutdown</li>
    + </ul>
    + <p>This release also updates translation:</p>
    + <ul>
    + <li>Chinese (Taiwan) (Cheng-Chia Tseng)</li>
    + </ul>
    + </description>
    + </release>
    +
    <release date="2025-06-02" version="48.2" type="stable">
    <description>
    <p>This is a stable release with the following changes:</p>
    diff -Nru gnome-software-48.2/debian/changelog gnome-software-48.3/debian/changelog
    --- gnome-software-48.2/debian/chang
  • From Simon McVittie@21:1/5 to All on Tue Jul 22 13:00:02 2025
    XPost: linux.debian.devel.release

    On Mon, 21 Jul 2025 at 21:37:02 +0000, Debian Bug Tracking System forwarded: >From: Ivo De Decker <[email protected]>

    Thanks for the filtered diff, it helped a lot, compared to the full diff. >Maybe some of the other unblock request could benefit from a filtered diff as >well.

    I thought I'd already filtered the debdiffs in all my GNOME unblock
    requests down to only the functional changes, but if there's more that I
    should have been filtering out, I'd be happy to do so.

    In unblock and -pu requests I've generally been filtering out the parts
    that I wouldn't want to have to read through if I was the release team:

    - patches that are also reflected as diffs to the patched code
    (debian/patches/*.patch), but leaving debian/patches/series in the
    diff to give an idea of how many patches I added or dropped

    - translations (po/*.po, etc.)

    - upstream's Gitlab or Github CI scripts, if we don't run them in Debian

    - Autotools noise (generally not applicable in GNOME any more, except in
    legacy packages, but still present in some of my other packages like
    ostree)

    but leaving in all the functional changes, plus change summaries like upstream's NEWS file which provide potentially useful context for what
    changed and why.

    smcv

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