Re: could dovecot be backported?

[Richard Laager <rlaager@debian.org>]

On 11/5/21 7:19 PM, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> On 11/5/21 19:58, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
> > > There's a list in the URL above, but I'm not sure what to do about that.
> > > Opening a bug report for every single one of them seems infeasible, 
> > > and I'm
> > > not even sure what all of them mean.
> > "not even sure what all of them mean" also suggests that you're
> > similarly not sure if they're relevant to Debian stable.
>
> Correct. I'd have to go through each of them in detail and I'm not an 
> expert on the codebase.
>
> Regardless, I think it's obvious at this point that I should just build 
> the latest version for myself by hacking the source package.

I think there are four different, but related, issues here and I'm not 
sure if the differences have been articulated clearly enough. So here's 
my go at it:

1. A new version (2.3.17) was released. If this hasn't been uploaded to 
unstable, you could file a bug asking the maintainer to do so. (Or just 
give them a bit more time.)

2. If there are meaningful feature differences between 2.3.16 in testing 
(or in the future 2.3.17 after item #1 is done) and 2.3.13 in stable, 
you could ask the maintainer (or someone else, or prepare yourself and 
have sponsored) a backport. This does come with a more-or-less 
obligation to maintain the backport through the lifetime of bullseye, so 
whoever is doing the backport needs to be willing to take that on.

3. If there are serious enough bugs in 2.3.13 in stable, then those can 
be fixed in the stable release. This requires the bugs already have a 
fix in unstable (so that moving forward does not regress systems). So, 
if those fixes are in 2.3.17, that needs to be uploaded first (item #1). 
Then individual bugs can be fixed with minimal backports of the relevant 
changes. See:
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.html#upload-stable

4. You want all of 2.3.17 for your particular system(s). This can be 
accomplished by #3 (which requires #1). Or you can build it yourself. 
Unless you are in a big rush, you might wait for #1 to happen and then 
backport it locally, which is often just as simple as downloading the 
Debian source package, adding a new changelog entry, and building it. I 
do this for a couple packages (usually different ones) every release 
cycle, for one reason or another.

--
Richard

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