Democracy player does not work on Debian lenny

[Simon McVittie]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 at 13:08:29 +0200, Eric JAUNY wrote:
> lns-bzn-52-82-65-65-142:~# /usr/bin/democracyplayer
> /var/lib/python-support/python2.4/dbus_bindings.py:1: DeprecationWarning:
> The dbus_bindings module is not public API and will go away soon.

This is a bug in Democracy Player. It's using (a lot of) unstable
private API that doesn't exist any more; it shouldn't do that. The rest
of the failures result from it using the private module that warning
refers to.

Please file a bug against Democracy Player, either in the Debian BTS or
upstream. I may be able to help with the port to a modern dbus-python if I
have time, so please Cc simon.mcvittie at collabora.co.uk - from a quick
glance at the single-instance code, a lot of the code that Democracy
Player is reinventing is available as public API in newer versions, so
it should be reasonably easy to make it work.

What they *should* be doing is:

* Choose and document a minimum version to support (the oldest version for
  which they don't have to use bizarre hacks and private interfaces, ideally)

* If dbus-python is older than the minimum version, either don't do
  anything on D-Bus (if the D-Bus functionality is non-critical) or
  refuse to run or install (if it's critical)

* When things could only be done using private interfaces in older versions,
  but those versions have to be supported, select based on version number
  whether to use the private interfaces (for those old versions only), or the
  proper public API (for newer versions that have it)

* Be careful not to reference any new features, or any uses of private
  interfaces, without a version check

When I removed the dbus_bindings module I checked Debian unstable for
packages that were using it and notified their upstream maintainers, but
I think Democracy Player entered Debian since then.

I do not consider the dbus_bindings and _dbus_bindings modules, or any
symbols starting with an underscore, to be part of dbus-python's public
API. They may change or be removed at any time, and apps that use them
should be considered broken.

Regards,
	Simon
	(dbus-python maintainer)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: OpenPGP key: http://www.pseudorandom.co.uk/2003/contact/ or pgp.net

iD8DBQFHGc0ZWSc8zVUw7HYRApfiAKCgfO3qT2oDA2xnBDnf6IkwKQ8nhwCgh0LC
Y/Fjx0gyTe6ZDRDTP8sD+og=
=SW4Q
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----