How to prevent a library transition

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi,

teTeX-3.0 has been sitting in experimental for a while; we have not
uploaded it to unstable because it involves a library soname bump, and
the release team has requested not to upload new library versions.

However, there's much more to this new upstream release, also much more
that requires thorough testing.  Therefore I'm unhappy with the current
situation, and looking for alternatives.

Wouldn't it be possible to do the following: teTeX-3.0 is uploaded to
unstable, including the libkpathsea4 and libkpathsea4-dev packages (it
uses the library itself), but at the same time libkpathsea3 and
libkpathsea-dev are still available as oldlibs, AND libkpathsea4-dev
does *not* provide libkpathsea-dev.

As far as I can see, in this case all other packages would continue
using libkpathsea-dev (corresponding to libkpathsea3) for building, and
continue to depend on libkpathsea3, which in turn would continue to be
available.  Only the tetex-bin deb itself would depend on libkpathsea4.

Thanks to the name change from libkpathsea-dev (soname version 3) to
libkpathsea4-dev, there would be no library transition at all.  At some
later date, we could trigger the transition, when library transitions
are allowed again.  

I'm eager to hear your comments.

(Just for the record: tetex-bin_3.0 does not contain sources for
libkpathsea3; there would have to be an additional source package). 

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer