Re: backporting Litecoin [not-in-testing]
On 06/04/2018 11:29 AM, Dmitry Smirnov wrote:
> On Monday, 4 June 2018 7:04:50 PM AEST Rhonda D'Vine wrote:
>> You have to understand that otherwise there
>> won't be an upgrade path for the package, which is one of the core
>> issues here too, and part of the reason why we want the package in
>> testing.
>
> This is really a minor concern and it wouldn't even be valid if we continue
> backporting for next release.
I strongly do not agree that this is a minor concern.
> We both know that often there is no upgrade path when software is removed
> from Debian (e.g. discontinued upstream) or when it couldn't keep up with
> library transitions in time for release.
It's not because some package have bugs and defects that it should
become the accepted rules.
> Here is another risk: would there be an upgrade path if I stop maintaining
> Litecoin? I don't know but future unknowns shouldn't prevent us from making
> sane decisions.
While the fact that you can at some point stop maintaining Litecoin
could be considered an unknown variable, the fact that there's no
upgrade path for a backport if the package isn't in stable+1 is a
certainty. The only way to fix this manually after the upgrade is:
apt-get install -t buster-backports litecoin
In other words, your package *WILL* be broken after the stretch to
buster upgrade, unless a manual fix is issued on the command line. This
would be a horrible upgrade user experience. That is *not* what the
official Debian backports are about, and Debian is widely recognized for
being upgradeable. Please don't break this.
You probably feel that it's allright, that one just need to get the
backport again. That's because you know the package. But how would you
get the information back to our users? Most wont know why after upgrade,
litecoin doesn't work anymore, and will fail to upgrade to stable+1
backports. And they will blame it (rightly) on Debian, saying our
upgrades don't work.
> The point is that you never know if there will be an upgrade path
> at all.
The point is that, the way you're proposing, we *KNOW* it's going to
break: there's no chance it wont.
> One can never be sure about future upgrade path as many things may
> change during release cycle.
Which is why upgrades are tested using piuparts, and I'm sure you've
received some bug reports for it.
But more than all of this, it would very much be nicer if you could
attempt to maintain Litecoin in Stable. That would be a way better than
just push it to backports, because it's difficult to do stable updates.
Yes, the Stable release team is sometimes slow to react to requests, and
it's hard to have the upgrades happen. But it's possible. And if it
happens that way, it's so much nicer for Debian users as well.
Cheers,
Thomas Goirand (zigo)
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