Hi developers, this is your reminder that all software that still depends on libsoup 2, whether directly or indirectly, will be removed from GNOME in February after GNOME 44 is branched. GNOME 44 will be the last GNOME release to include libsoup 2.
Currently no GNOME apps directly depend on libsoup 2, but many do still depend on libgdata and geoclue, which have outstanding merge requests that have not yet been accepted. If your software depends on either of these libraries, it is at risk. Please keep an eye on the situation.
GNOME 44 will be the last GNOME release to include libsoup 2.
(Well, at least that’s the current plan, but it’s actually possible that we will be able to remove it for GNOME 43 depending on how things go with geoclue and libgdata.)
libgrss is not part of GNOME core, so it will be unaffected by this removal. tracker-miners in GNOME core does not depend on libgrss because it is built with -Dminer_rss=false.
I’ve never heard of libdmapsharing. That’s not part of gnome-build-meta at all, and our GNOME Music build certainly does not depend on it. Same for grilo-plugins. No special build flags are required to avoid this dependency in either case.
I can confirm at this point that the only affected apps will be those that depend on libgdata or geoclue.
Software that will be removed if geoclue does not release a libsoup 3 version within the next three months: xdg-desktop-portal, gnome-clocks, gnome-initial-setup, gnome-maps, gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-shell, gnome-weather, webkitgtk. Needless to say, this will be catastrophic, but I’m not bluffing; we really need to finish this transition. It would be much easier merge geoclue’s libsoup 3 merge request than to remove the geoclue dependency from all of these different places.
Software affected by libgdata removal is: grilo-plugins, gvfs-daemon, gvfs. Fortunately, none of these will need to be removed from GNOME core. It is an automagic dependency of grilo-plugins, same as libdmapsharing, so we can just remove it there without even adjusting any build flags. This is very unimpressive (it violates rule 3 here as the build system goes out of its way to ensure we don’t notice that the features are disabled when the dependencies are missing). Then gvfs can be built with -Dgoogle=false. I’ll actually handle this right now, so geoclue is the last thing we need to worry about.