Am 11.08.2011 19:12, schrieb Jonas Smedegaard:
My god, how can one be so ignorant and disrespectful as to not listen to
the arguments put forward (or ask if those are not understood).

Talking about arguments, I have two arguments in the form of users that have reported real issues with the morituri package.

Your first argument was to blame the user for not using aptitude for upgrades. This turned out as bullshit, because even aptitude does not remove packages that still satisfy dependencies. And since the morituri package currently only depends on unversioned python, this dependency is even satisfied by python2.3, so why remove it.

The second user did use aptitude for his upgrade but obviously still faced the same issue. Then you told this user about some alleged policy that requires to remove old packages that are not part of the distribution anymore on upgrades. As a matter of fact, this policy does not exist. Nothing requires me to remove python2.3 on upgrades if it is not maintained in Debian anymore. I can keep python2.3 as long as I want, nothing forbids this.

So what should lead to a removal of python2.3 on upgrades if not package dependencies? It is packages like morituri with imprecise dependencies that break upgrades for our users. You say that "It is beneficial to Debian to keep package dependencies as simple as possible." Generally I agree, but I'd also say it is even more benefical to try as hard as possible not to break things - even possibly unsupported corner cases.

All it took me to fix this issue was a bit of investigation [1] and changing six (!) bytes in the Debian packaging. If you cannot live with others applying such tiny changes to your pet packages, you shouldn't have them team-maintained!

 - Fabian


[1] For example in the Debian Python Policy, which BTW states:
"The keyword "all" means that the package supports any Python version available but might be deprecated in the future since using version numbers is clearer than "all" and encodes more information."
<http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/python-policy/ch-module_packages.html>



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