How to deal with ATK & AT-SPI merger?

[jtojnar]

Several accessibility-related projects have been merged into a single repository.

• https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core/-/merge_requests/78
• https://viruta.org/accessibility-repos-are-now-merged.html
• https://discourse.gnome.org/t/atk-and-at-spi2-atk-merged-into-at-spi2-core/10032
• https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/merge_requests/1617

We need to decide how to deal with that before GNOME 43 is released in autumn:

• Create a single package for all the projects and make the old ones aliases.
• Work with upstream to make the projects individually buildable and installable.
• Patch stuff locally.

cc @NixOS/gnome @NixOS/freedesktop

[jtojnar]

In #182618, I have decided to go with the first option, keeping the aliases in all-packages to allow for potentially splitting the package in the future.

[ghost]

Several accessibility-related projects have been merged into a single repository.

This is really unfortunate and seems rushed.

Their goal is admirable:

Remove all the hand-written DBus code in at-spi2-core; replace with gdbus as generated from the XML files.

... but until they finish doing that, they're forcing everything downstream of gtk3 (and even gtk2!) to use that scary code that needs to be removed. ATK is a hard, non-disableable dependency of gtk2 and later, and now so is at-spi2-core.

That really seems like a step backwards. Personally I'll be pinning ATK to 2.44.1 until they release a version that takes the compensating two steps forward.

[jtojnar]

Apparently, ATK can now be built separately so we might want to split it out again: #236817