dbus development packages needed to build remote control?

At the moment, ./configure decides upon availability of libdbus development package whether remote control should be built. I could however not make out any location in the source code or the build process where it needs those packages. DBUS_LIBS and DBUS_CFLAGS are set in the Makefile but never used.

To test I removed the check for dbus development packages from configure.ac (set have_remote=true unconditionally) and removed libdbus-1-dev from my system, the (debian) package built and ran fine with gajim-remote. I might have missed something, so it would be nice if an experienced programmer could have a look. If on the other hand the building indeed needs libdbus devel packages it should Build-Depend on libdbus-1-dev in debian/control.

Also, there does not appear to be a binary depending directly on the dbus shared library (there are only two executables in the package, both are python scripts and thus recommend python-dbus, which in turn depends on dbus on its own). If that is true as well I suggest removing dbus from the Recommends:-Line in debian/control

Patch in case my assumptions are correct

indeed dbus-dev is not really needed. We use it to know the dbus version cause we need dbus >= 0.60. As there is no other solution than having dbus-dev installed, we install gajim-remote only if dbus>=0.60 is installed.

for the debian thing, you're right. official version depends on libdbus-1-dev, but I've not backported that in svn. I do that now.

(In d10182c7) for debian package: build-depend on libdbus-1-dev, don't recommand dbus (python2.4 depends on it), recommand python-gnupginterface instead of suggest it, don't depend on python2.4-pysqlite2 if python2.5 is installed. see #2992 (closed)

Well, you don't have a build dependency on any version of dbus, do you? So you should rather recommend python-dbus (>= 0.60) and be done with it.

I'm not sure what you are trying to archive with the versioned python dependencies though, it contradicts Debian Python Policy (see ticket #2971 (closed)), imho you should revert that.

indeed we don't really build-depend on dbus. but your solution is not perfect, python-dbus version is not the same as libdbus version. For exemple python-dbus 0.80.1-1 depends on libdbus-1-3 (>= 0.94). Moreover this is only for debian. for other systems, there is no other way to test libdbus version.\n\nOf course one solution would be: don't check that in our configure script and let's packager do things. But I'm not sure it's a good solution. Moreover the -dev package is only needed for ppl who build things from source. This mean only packagers (it not a pb to ask them to install -dev packages) and sources based distributions (once again it's not a pb IMHO to ask them to install -dev packages)\n\nyou're right for versionned python thing. reverted in 8fc93418

Couldn't we just run a small python script in our configure script that does nothing more than return the version of dbus?

(In 5da72ae7) don't require libdbus-1-dev to have gajim-remote. All distributions have libdbus > 0.60 now. Fixes #2992 (closed)