Hi Joey, Thanks for your quick response after the ping.
On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 02:47:03PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > Your patch already has the preinst calling update-catalog. AFAICS, > update-catalog could check with dpkg-query if the file is not owned > by a package, and not remove it unless this was the case, and it was > called with --transition. Agreed. > In the unlikely event that the admin called it, it would detect that > the file was a conffile and not delete it. An admin could call update-catalog --transition for a package that was not rebuilt with the newer debhelper. In that case harm would still happen. Do you have an idea about how to prevent this? > I do not see any complexity in a versioned dependency; > dh_installcatalogs already adds one. It must be a Pre-Depends, since we are using it in preinst. So I could argue that it is even too complex for you to spot on the first look. > > > and if we really need to apply further fixes we > > > need to change two packages now. > > No, you just change sgml-base in a manner consistent with its new interface. > debhelper does not enter this highly hypothetical scenario. I agree on your reasoning to keep the transition code at a single place. If things really go wrong though, I would assume that just changing the preinst hook is not enough. In that case we really need to touch debhelper as well. > > > Not mentioning the combinatorial > > > explosion of version combinations (of debhelper and sgml-base) > > AFAICS the "explosion" results in 4 combinations. If you were not planning on further fixes, there would be no need to move the transitional code to sgml-base, because it would just work. Assuming that we need to release another sgml-base and debhelper version we now have at least 9 combinations. The actual explosion resides in the relationships. As pointed out above, we already need Pre-Depend. The number of possible relationships you can declare really explodes. > > > Another > > > argument against this move is that it makes removing the transitional > > > code much harder. > > Well, it's what, 3 lines? The difference is that it's 3 lines in one > place. Almost. You need to remove both the caller and the callee. Even though concur with your line count, this is two places. If we can sort out the issue about the admin, I can change the patch to move the transitional code to sgml-base. Helmut -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
