Downgradeability of backports
Dear backports ftp-masters,
I'm thinking about backporting open-iscsi from Stretch to Jessie
(together with open-isns, as that's a new dependency [1]). The
reason is that newer open-iscsi versions add support for a new
daemon called 'iscsiuio' that allows offloading of iSCSI
sessions to special network cards. I know of at least one user
who's already backporting this for themselves, and of other
users who've requested iscsiuio support.
The problem is that I completely redid the startup logic in sid's
open-iscsi package (completely unrelated to iscsiuio), it's now
much more robust than before. However, because of technical
details, downgrading is not an option - at all. Since iSCSI is
storage (and potentially your root filesystem), this is so bad
that I've added a prerm debconf prompt to the package in Stretch
and sid to detect downgrades below the version this was changed,
and warn the user not to shoot themselves in the foot.
Now I know that downgrades are not officially supported in Debian
at all, but from practical experience I know that lots of people
may downgrade software from backports back to stable if they're
not completely happy with it. In case of something like an office
suite, that's perfectly fine, because it's no problem to purge it
completely and reinstall the old version, but with open-iscsi this
is not that easy, especially if your root filesystem is on it.
Hence my question: since I already have the debconf prompt in the
stretch package, is it acceptable to upload this to backports?
Or would the downgradeability issue be a blocker here?
Regards,
Christian
[1] open-isns itself is probably not worth backporting on is own,
even though it's not available in Jessie, (too niche), so
I'd only also backport that because open-iscsi in Stretch
now depends on libisns0. Just FTR.
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