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Specify API versions for all public GIR APIs, except GLib

Simon McVittie requested to merge wip/smcv/gir-api-versions into main

If one of these libraries breaks its GIR API in future, then upgrading packages unrelated to gnome-shell might pull in the newer version, causing gnome-shell to crash when it gets a newer GIR API that is incompatible with its expectations. For example, this seems to be happening in Debian testing at the moment, when GNOME Shell 41.4 imports GWeather and can get version 4.0 instead of the version 3.0 that it expected.

Adding explicit API versions at the time the newer version is released is too late, because that will still let the newer version of the GIR API break pre-existing GNOME Shell packages. Prevent similar crashes in future by making the desired versions explicit.

This is done for all third-party libraries except GLib, similar to the common practice in Python code; if GLib breaks API, then that will be a disruptive change to the whole GLib/GObject ecosystem, regardless.

Gvc, Meta, Shell, Shew, St are not included because they're private (only exist in a non-default search path entry).

Clutter and Cogl are included, because we need to import the fork of them that comes with Meta, as opposed to their deprecated standalone versions.

Bug-Debian: https://bugs.debian.org/1008926

Edited by Simon McVittie

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