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Re: Advice on how best to handle non-backwards compatibility



On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 02:25:43PM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Hi Andrew!
> 
> On 2004-01-07 13:55 +1000, Andrew Pollock wrote:
> > I'm wondering how best to proceed. I'm not sure that I can on-the-fly
> > convert the printcap. I'm thinking the best thing I can do is detect this
> > situation, and pop up a Debconf note alerting the user to the situation, but
> > I wanted to get a general opinion on whether this would be considered abuse
> > of Debconf notes before I did this.

> My personal feeling is that a debconf note is appropriate here; at
> least I would like to see one. Even with priority important. It is not
> nice if an apt-get upgrade breaks an important functionality
> (printing) and does not tell me about it.

NO NO NO.

Debconf notes DO NOT excuse RC bugs, and torching existing config files
(/etc/printcap is a config file) is an RC bug!

If a tool cannot properly handle the non-trivial task of parsing
well-formed printcap files, then we should not be shipping such crap, no
matter how pretty the interface might look.

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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