Jonas Smedegaard <d...@jones.dk> writes: > On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 12:50:27PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> If I were you, I'd special-case the debhelper dependency here to always >> match the compat level (unless, of course, something is in use that >> requires a newer version than the compat level). > I understand you reasoning for backporting, but not for allowing > alternate tools. Did you not respond to that part, or do you mean to > say that debhelper makes no sense to make room for alternate > implementations of? The latter. Given the number of dependencies for debhelper in the archive that are already versioned and will likely remain so (the archive as a whole takes up new debhelper compat levels significantly faster than the migration of those compat levels into a stable release; notice how many packages are already depending on debhelper 7.0.50 or later for override support), a replacement for debhelper is not going to be able to just Provide: debhelper and have that work in most interesting cases anyway. Should anyone make a serious attempt to provide an alternative implementation of debhelper, it will require using a versioned virtual package similar to what's done for debconf, which will require more comprehensive dependency changes anyway. In the meantime, not versioning debhelper dependencies for the one, somewhat special case of using an older compat level isn't going to help much with such a possible future transition. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org