gnucash update on debian errors, then stops

[John Ralls]

> On Aug 3, 2017, at 8:37 PM, Tommy Trussell <tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Yes, the webkit1 dependency will be replaced with webkit2 for Unix (webkit2gtk doesn't support windows) in 2.8.

Regards,
John Ralls