Hi, On 21-01-2024 16:08, Matthias Urlichs wrote:
However according to our release notes we only support upgrading from release x to x+1, skipping releases is not allowed.I'm not talking about skipping releases but about partial upgrades. Thus …> foo/testing requires bar >=1.1 to work but just states "Depends: bar >=1", and bar/stable is 1.0.42assume that Stable has bar/stable==1.0.42 and foo/stable==2.1, while Testing has foo/stable==2.2. $USER adds Testing (or possibly stable/backports) to their apt.sources, updates foo, observes breakage, and now needs to dig through dependencies to figure out what went wrong.
Because of the way we do QA on unstable to testing migration, we are in practice finding more and more of these cases. Which also means that we're supporting partial upgrades better over time. With my Release Team member hat on, I think we find these versioned relations increasingly more important to properly document, albeit not (yet?) at RC level. If I were to judge the severity, I think missing a *versioned* relation is typically severity important if with the older version (in testing or stable) a binary package (from unstable or testing) hardly works. Quite a lot of autopkgtest failures that I reported over the years fall in this category and I have not seen push back for adding the versioned relation in case of breakage of the binary's functionality. (Solving test breakage in case of version skew with versioned relations has seen push back occasionally, but that's not what we're discussing here (and I agree that regularly that's overkill)).
So when I, as a maintainer, notice a problem along these lines, do I file a bug?
Yes please. The solution is simple (in most cases, except for key packages and loops) while the maintenance price isn't that high (e.g. the janitor even helps to get rid of an obsolete versioned relation).
Conversely, when I get this sort of bug report for one of my packages, is it OK to reply "that's not supported, go away"?
I claim that nowadays we (as a project) don't expect our maintainers to reply like that. Yes, as far as I know partial upgrades are still not officially supposed to always work, but I think in practice it works quite well, so I think we support it as far as "it works most of the time reasonably well in reasonable configurations".
Paul
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