Re: debhelper and friends for LTS

[Adrian Bunk]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2019 at 12:46:54PM +0200, Ondřej Surý wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> the jessie-backports removal itself is a logical step and it’s good that it 
> was done.
> 
> That said, it complicates things a lot when backporting packages to Jessie. 
> Usually, it’s fine to just pull $random extra library to the extra 
> repository, but debhelper and friends is a different beast, as it often 
> requires upgrades in steps, or pulling some extra packages or dropping them, 
> etc.

The packages are still available after the removal:
  deb [check-valid-until=no] http://archive.debian.org/debian jessie-backports 
main

> This is now especially painful with the differences between debhelper compact 
> 9/10 and 11/12 as those changes require reverting lots of tiny bits in the 
> source packages as more and more gets converted to v12.
>
> I don’t have a good solution for this, but keeping the debhelper and friends 
> (dpkg-dev, dh_) in an extra suite would be very much helpful for people 
> like me backporting bigger stacks to Jessie. I provide PHP (5.6, 7.0 and up), 
> apache2, nginx, ... and it’s very painful from time to time.
>...

AFAIK debhelper >= 11 was never in jessie-backports-sloppy.

And the requirement to backport packages like cmake or meson from buster 
would make it *very* painful for anyone trying to backport debhelper 12 
to jessie.

> Cheers,
> Ondrej

cu
Adrian

-- 

   "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
   "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
   Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

debhelper and friends for LTS

[Ondřej Surý]

Hey,

the jessie-backports removal itself is a logical step and it’s good that it was 
done.

That said, it complicates things a lot when backporting packages to Jessie. 
Usually, it’s fine to just pull $random extra library to the extra repository, 
but debhelper and friends is a different beast, as it often requires upgrades 
in steps, or pulling some extra packages or dropping them, etc.

This is now especially painful with the differences between debhelper compact 
9/10 and 11/12 as those changes require reverting lots of tiny bits in the 
source packages as more and more gets converted to v12.

I don’t have a good solution for this, but keeping the debhelper and friends 
(dpkg-dev, dh_) in an extra suite would be very much helpful for people 
like me backporting bigger stacks to Jessie. I provide PHP (5.6, 7.0 and up), 
apache2, nginx, ... and it’s very painful from time to time.

(As a side remark, I would love to see Debian to settle on one way of 
maintaining packages, as packages in SVN or even without any SCM are also 
pain...)

Cheers,
Ondrej
--
Ondřej Surý