Peter Samuelson wrote: > It's pretty clear that this is social engineering. The dpkg > maintainers want to force every package maintainer to _think_ about > which source format they wish to use. To ensure that, in the long run, > you no longer have the choice to simply ignore the format war.
I wonder if anything can be learned from debhelper's history of compatability levels. numpkgs compat level introduced deprecated 1 8 Jun 2010 6625 7 Apr 2008 675 6 Jan 2008 5398 5 Nov 2005 1638 4 Apr 2002 Mar 2009 156 3 Feb 2001 Nov 2005 25 2 Jul 2000 Jun 2005 25 1 Sep 1997 Jun 2005 557 unknown[1] Sep 1997 Jun 2005 [1] No debian/compat or DH_COMPAT currently means compat level 1 is used. A few hundred of these packages do not use debhelper at all; I don't have the exact number handy. Some points I'd draw from this data and what I remember about how the numbers used to look: * About 50% of packages switched to the newest version in just a couple of years, without me being too annoying with deprecation messages, or making any changes that forced the switch. * Deprecation warnings seem to do a good job of gradually eroding the number of holdouts after the initial switch rush. (The relatively large number of packages still using v4 is probably because it was the "best" level for a long period (2002-2005), and only started deprecation warnings a year ago.) * After a certian point, one has to take action to get rid of the last few packages in the long tail. It would be pretty easy at this point for me to get rid of v2 and v3 entirely. But still probably not worth the effort, as it would only remove a few dozen lines of code from debhelper. The time is better spent getting rid of individual deprecated debhelper commands. * At this point, mandating a version number at the cost of breaking a few hundred packages might be worth it, though mostly because it would probably cause half of them to update away from v1. * If I had mandated a version when v2 was introduced, I would have caused many long threads on debian-devel, and would probably now have to contend with a lump of packages using v2 (or yada) instead of the current lump at v1. -- see shy jo
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