Re: Transitionning to the lextudio pysnmp / pyasn1 ecosystem
Scott & everyone,
On 9/16/23 19:04, Scott Kitterman wrote:
It's pretty relevant to your question. If you had instead updated the existing packages from the new upstream, no transition would be needed.
I'm not entirely sure that no transition is needed, no. The major
version was bumped to version 5, and I have no clue if this represent
some incompatibility. This needs to be tested at least (see below).
Did you check with the existing maintainers to see what they thought?
Hum ... why do you think I've opened this thread?
As is usually the case in Debian, I think the answer is you work with the maintainers to figure out the best solution. Ignoring them and hijacking the packages is not the right answer.
Ditto.
Plus I really dislike that you write the word "hijacking". That's not at
all my intention, and /me opening this thread proves it.
Anyways, let's try to be more productive... I thought it was kind of
obvious why I did things the way I did, but let me try to be more explicit.
It is my understanding that "pysnmp4" doesn't match "pysnmp-lextudio"
released as version 5.0.20. We could rename the binary as
"python3-pysnmp" (ommiting the "4"), and have a transition package, yes.
But I have no confidence that they are drop-in replacements (I just
don't know yet...).
The packages that I maintain do need the lextudio modules *now*
(OpenStack moves fast, I cannot afford to wait 6 months), so I thought
it was faster to address the current situation first with my uploads, so
I can offer a continuity of what I already packaged (ie: Ironic and
other OpenStack stuff). Though believe me, I want to do the things
properly, and I have no intention of hijacking anyone's work. If someone
wants to work on this with me, we can move the 4 new lextudio packages
back in the team, of course. I have already too many packages under my
responsibility, I'd love to have others working on them. Then I can act
on the OpenStack part of things quickly once we agree on the way to go.
So let me ask once more the persons involved and/ore volunteering on
this: what's your suggestion? There's actually 2 paths (and yes, I had
the 2 paths in mind before Scott suggested replacing the older packages):
1/ We get the lextudio packages replace the older packages like Scott
suggested. This would be a transition anyways, since we're moving to
version 5 and there's a year of commits. If we're to do like this, then
we need to make sure that:
- the lextudio replacing packages are staged in experimental first, and
look at the pseudo-excuse
- the reverse dependencies have meaningful autopkgtest, otherwise
uploading to experimental first is pointless, and then 2/ below becomes
the best solution
2/ The other possibility, is what I suggested and envisioned first, by
uploading the lextudio packages: open 9 bugs, and let maintainers switch
to the new packages. This is IMO the safest path, as it wont create any
breakage, though we'd have conflicting packages for a while, which can
be annoying. We got to make sure the transition finishes quickly enough
then (meaning, probably make the bugs RC after some time, so we make
sure we can remove the older pysnmp/asn1 packages before Trixie freeze).
I don't think 2/ is an inferior way of doing things. I am still
convinced that I did the right way, that uploading the *-lextudio
packages was correct, so that current maintainers of reverse
dependencies can at least test and see if everything goes well with the
new packages, without destroying them. I also continue to have OpenStack
packages working this way, and I'm not destroying reverse dependencies
carelessly.
Please share your thoughts on how to do it,
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
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