Re: The png fiasco, libqt2, and GNOME
On Mon, Jan 07, 2002 at 11:54:30AM +1100, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > I don't understand why you say that.
> Let me clarify. This is not something that can be done *cleanly* with
> bugs, nor something that I have any desire to do with bugs.
Bugs aren't a mechanism, they're a communications tool. If something's
not working correctly (and right now things *aren't* working correctly),
there's a bug, and it should be documented. That's all there is to it.
Generally, you can rely on testing to just get this right if you follow
that rule, and you're better off not trying to second guess it.
> > > Bug AJ to do it. It is not a bug in libqt2, and it is most certainly not
> > > critical.
> > I would suggest that the consensus opinion of the last week is that
> > the partial upgrade breakage for the libqt & KDE packages was a problem.
> > I am only concerned about avoiding the same problem occurring when
> > the packages trickle into TESTING, one by one.
The real problem is that partial upgrades are a supported feature of
Debian: if you update libqt but don't update some old .debs (from a few
months ago in testing, from RevKrusty's external potato KDE archives,
whatever) and stuff doesn't work, that's a serious bug. These things
have to be fully expressed with dependencies.
> So let them trickle in over a couple of days; what's the harm? There's
> no bug in any of the packages;
You may not think it's your fault, but if the packages don't work there's
definitely a bug. From what I've seen described there are only three ways of
fixing it:
* revert qt and everything that's rebuilt to libpng2, and worry
about it later
* change libpng3 so that it works with libpng2
[providing a libpng2 compatability lib may work, here]
* acknowledge that qt-based-on-png2 and qt-based-on-png3 aren't
fully compatible and change qt's .so-name, and change the name of
the package it's in
Ignoring the problem ("Oh, everyone just recompile, and we'll pretend
nothing happened, and not worry about users whose systems break when they
`apt-get install' something") is an option, but it's not a good one.
> at most an important-severity to rebuild
> with libpng3 (all of mine are currently being rebuilt and uploaded), so
> I don't see why you want to inflate severities.
Policy requires packages to accurately specify their dependencies with
a Depends: line; packages that used to Depend: on libqt, libpng2 are now
broken because libqt's interface changed. That's a bunch of serious bugs,
one way or another. It's not inflated at all.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
The daffodils are coming. Are you?
linux.conf.au, February 2002, Brisbane, Australia
--- http://linux.conf.au/
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