gnucash update on debian errors, then stops

[Tommy Trussell]

On Tue, Aug 1, 2017 at 8:24 PM, John Griessen <john at industromatic.com>
wrote:

> I have not been able to upgrade gnucash for a while now.
>
> Will there be a usable gnucash in the next debian release?
> If not, why not?
>
> I still use this version on debian stretch/testing/frozen, soon to be the
> new released debian stable:
>

For now I presume you might switch to using the version at getdeb.net
though I don't know your particular requirements. Another option, of
course, is to build it yourself. See https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Debian
though it looks like a lot on that page is kindof stale, and it doesn't
link you to the pages describing how to build from git or a tarball -- see
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Building

HOWEVER I have been seeing warnings from Debian for several weeks now about
GnuCash's impending removal from Testing.

In past years this has been because of a packaging issue, which always
seems to get resolved by the maintainer before the deadline and things go
on normally.

This time it was apparently more fundamental -- the warnings were because
GnuCash depends upon webkitgtk:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=866671

"webkitgtk: Unmaintained, not suitable for buster"

Again I presumed this is a fairly straightforward issue, but on July 31st I
saw this email:


Debian testing watch <noreply at release.debian.org>
> to gnucash
> FYI: The status of the gnucash source package
> in Debian's testing distribution has changed.
>   Previous version: 1:2.6.17-1
>   Current version:  (not in testing)
>   Hint: <https://release.debian.org/britney/hints/auto-removals>
>     Bug #790204: gnucash: depends on libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 which is deprecated
> The script that generates this mail tries to extract removal
> reasons from comments in the britney hint files. Those comments
> were not originally meant to be machine readable, so if the
> reason for removing your package seems to be nonsense, it is
> probably the reporting script that got confused. Please check the
> actual hints file before you complain about meaningless removals.


Here's the link to that bug:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=790204

The same volunteer has maintained the Debian GnuCash package for years. I
presume he might have contacted the GnuCash developers for guidance, but I
haven't noticed any messages from him go across the gnucash-dev email list.

I HAVE seen discussions about updating the webkit dependencies, but if
there was any particular urgency I didn't notice.




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