Re: Recent version of dpkg-maintscript-helper needed for BPO
Hi Thomas,
On Thu, 13 Feb 2014, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> So I wonder, could dpkg-maintscript-helper be in another source package
> than dpkg, so that it could be easily backported?
Even if it was part of another package, it would have strong versioned
dependencies against dpkg because this script is allowed to rely on
various internal details of how dpkg is working that cannot be safely
assumed when you're not coupled with dpkg.
Even if it currently works by using only public interfaces of dpkg, it
might need to be changed the day where dpkg gets smarter native conffile
handling and we don't want to risk having a broken combination of
dpkg/dpkg-maintscript-helper.
Thinking a bit more about this, what we currently need is to restrict
dpkg-maintscript-helper to a maximal dpkg version that is known to be
compatible. So it might be doable but it will be painful to handle as
it will require an update for each new version of dpkg. And the day where
dpkg changes in a way that impact dpkg-maintscript-helper we're back to
a situation with tight dependencies.
So I'd rather not do it. I know that backporting dpkg is frowned upon
by the backports maintainer but I don't really understand this. If the
backport is prepared with care and acked by the dpkg maintainers, it
should not be a big source of worries.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
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