Re: why is it not moving to testing

[Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk>]

Question about interpretation of policy:

How acceptable is it to put a debian/shlibs.local into one's
package so that it will require the woody version of libc6
rather than the version dictated by the current
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6.shlibs ?  

Technically it is reasonable to do this because whereas 
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libc6.shlibs dictates the most
recent version of libc6 (... it has to do this in order
to deal with the worst case of a program that uses
features added in the most recent version ...), most programs
work correctly with older versions (because they don't
use such new features).

The advantage of doing this is that one's package is not 
unnecessarily held out of testing while libc6 bugs are
worked out.  Also, users who want to upgrade the package
don't need to upgrade libc6 if they don't want to.

On the other hand, policy says that debian/shlibs.local 
should be used "only as a temporary fix if your
binaries or libraries depend on a library whose package
does not yet provide a correct shlibs file. [policy 9.6]"

I guess the question is: can I regard a too-stringent
version requirement as "incorrect" for the purposes of
policy clause 9.6?

-- 
Thomas Hood <jdthood@yahoo.co.uk>