Wouter Verhelst <wou...@debian.org> writes:

> Op woensdag 7 mei 2014 12:19:31 schreef Philip Hands:
...
>> we could perhaps give public variables a
>> version number, or only allow questions with such a version number as
>> part of their name be manipulated from elsewhere.
>
> I don't think debconf needs to care about that, though. A maintainer "just" 
> needs to make sure that whenever they change the meaning of a public debconf 
> question, they need to change the name (possibly by incrementing an embedded 
> number in that name). That's something we should document, but which would be 
> pretty hard to enforce, I suppose.

If a "public question" were defined as being one that includes a version
number in a particular format, that would ensure that all public
questions have a version.

Or do you mean that bumping the version when needed would be hard to
enforce? -- fair point -- One could hope that the presure of bug reports
might result in new versions when needed (although that doesn't actually
solve the problem of packages that had new behaviour with old version
number being out in the wild).

I have my doubts that there will be enough users to spot such bugs
quickly enough though.  If such breakage makes it into a release, then
we're inflicting a lot of pain on any downstream that is relying on this
working, and it'll be nasty to untangle the resulting mess.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND

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