Bug#998903: src:libidn: fails to migrate to testing for too long

[Sunil Mohan Adapa]

On 11/10/21 16:25, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> James Valleroy via "Discussion list for GNU Internationalized Domain
> Name library (Libidn)" <help-libidn@gnu.org> writes:
>
> > On 11/10/21 6:40 AM, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> > > James, what do you think?  Is the libidn11-java package important for
> > > you to have in Debian?  My perception was that nobody really used it,
> > > and IDNA2003/StringPrep is old technology so it feels strange that new
> > > code is coming around using.  While I am also upstream of this Java
> > > code, I'm not familiar with how Java stuff is packaged/used in Debian,
> > > and maybe there is another way of doing things that is just as easy for
> > > you.
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > (Adding Sunil who did most of the packaging work for libjxmpp-java.)
> >
> > libjxmpp-java was packaged as a dependency of jitsi-videobridge.
> > Specifically for Jitsi we need the -core, -jid, and -util-cache modules.
> >
> > It looks like libidn is only used for jxmpp-stringprep-libidn module.
> > Possibly we can disable building this module.
>
> Is it not used by anything else?  If so, I agree it makes sense to
> disable it, unless you think it is useful elsewhere.  I could add
> libidn11-java back if there is real usage of it, but if it is not needed
> for anything particular right now, I would prefer if you disable it
> until there is real interest in using it.  When/if that occurs, we can
> always add libidn11-java and jxmpp-stringprep-libidn back again.
> Hopefully, XMPP will be updated to use something newer than StringPrep
> meanwhile.

Simon, thank you for offering to build the library again if needed.

My understanding was that one of the three stringprep implementations is 
needed to use the jxmpp library. They are based on libidn, icu4j and 
rocksxmppprecis. Of these, we have only built the stringprep library 
based on libidn and assumed it to be critical.

However, I dug up a bit more in jitsi-xmpp-extenstions and other 
jitsi-videobridge code. To use the jxmpp-stringprep-libidn library one 
needs to import the class and call setup() on it. This does seem to be 
happening anywhere as far as I can tell. In this case, the jxmpp library 
seems to use a fallback implementation. It appears we can drop building 
the library jxmpp-stringprep-libidn although I can't say for sure 
without going through jitsi and all of its dependencies more thoroughly.

When we progress more on the packaging effort we might know better and 
can then request libidn to build libidn11-java again.

James, let us drop building jxmpp-stringprep-libidn for now and drop 
dependency on libidn11-java.

Thanks,

--
Sunil