Hi, Please CC people on bug reports. The Debian bug tracker does not automatically copy anyone except for the package Maintainer (according to debian/control) and it's a hassle to subscribe to bug reports.
It's a good question about whether you can disable some optional features. I expect libgnomeui to be removed from Testing next week (it was already disabled in Debian's lablgtk2 last year). The Debian GNOME wants to remove gtksourceview2 and libgnomecanvas from Testing too. Maybe it's too early for you to be interested, but for the release after Buster (Bullseye), we'd like to remove gtkspell and libglade2 also. (The idea is to strongly push as much software as we can to stop using gtk2 even though it might not be possible to get the number of packaging using gtk2 all the way to zero in time for Bullseye.) I haven't investigated, but from the dependencies mentioned in my first 2 emails for this bug, it appears like there are several Debian packages that do use the gnomecanvas support. I don't know how practical it will be to build lablgtk2 without it. Thanks, Jeremy Bicha