On Sat, 19 Sep 2026 at 09:43:41 +0200, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
it seems that libgepub is for reading ebooks (and generating thumbnails of it)
so maybe we can drop the relevant plugin from s390x as well, so we wouldn't
need to totally remove tumbler from there
If it's straightforward to disable the libgepub plugin on big-endian and
that can be done soon, then that would be fine, and you can close this
bug as no longer needed.
To avoid having to investigate whether the WebKitGTK dependency is
avoidable, and then generate new time-sensitive work for maintainers,
I've generally been suggesting removal of whole source packages (like
this one) if they have no or few reverse-dependencies, and only asking
for targeted removal of features if the source package has enough rdeps
that it would be inconvenient to remove them all individually (like
evolution-data-server and wxwidgets3.2).
For comparison,
https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/evolution-data-server/-/commit/1d4343d673180fd5e889bf4548560c7ae4cca60b
is the e-d-s change disabling its WebKitGTK-related features.
If you're changing the source package, ideally disable
WebKitGTK-dependent features on all of the BE -ports architectures and
not just s390x, meaning:
[!s390x !hppa !m68k !powerpc !ppc64 !sparc64]
If the ftp team removes tumbler from s390x, and then you make it
buildable on s390x (without WebKitGTK), then your new upload will undo
the removal, so it's harmless either way. What matters is that the
removal of webkit2gtk from s390x gets unblocked reasonably soon, so that
the webkit2gtk maintainers can take the new upstream release from
experimental and re-upload it to unstable before the next serious
security vulnerability happens.
I'm unsure if there's any Xfce user
on s390x though so maybe it's not really worth it
Yes, that had been my reasoning - my understanding is that s390x
machines are expensive mainframes designed for non-interactive batch
processing, so it seems highly unlikely that anyone is using them to run
a desktop environment, manage their media collection, read GNOME
documentation, read RSS feeds or any of the other things that can be
done with the packages whose removal I've proposed.
Nothing seems to have a hard dependency on tumbler - I assume there's
some XFCE metapackage that Recommends it? If so, it'll still be possible
to install XFCE on s390x, just with reduced functionality.
smcv
