Re: new tar behavior and --wildcards
On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 10:32:30PM -0400, Bdale Garbee wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 10:36 +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> > In addition, I would suggest we reinstate the previous behaviour, but
> > display a warning when wildcards are used but --wildcards is not set.
>
> The problem with this is that generating a new warning can also cause
> people to need to update scripts, since lots of people seem to parse the
> output of commands like tar in wrapper scripts. So, I'm not convinced
> that this is really a good idea. I'm also always hesitant to deviate
> Debian default behavior for utilities like tar from upstream.
Well, but the new tar is already generating warning anyway and people
parsing tar stderr output get what they deserve.
It is Debian role to provide transition plan when upstream break
backward compatibility, and we do that on a large scale.
> All in all, I'm not yet convinced that reverting to the old wildcard
> behavior is the right thing to do. I've only heard about problems in a
> few (four?) packages so far, and all of them are Debian-specific
> programs that should be easy for us to update. I see no need for panic,
> though it's obviously and clearly regrettable that the packages in
> questions are ones that affect processes like building and testing
> Debian packages.
But we have not yet even started to check for breakage. Someone could
start to rebuild the whole archive with the new tar and report problem,
check every maintainer script in sarge and etch, etc.
I have to say I am a bit surprised you did not even test if the basic
packaging tools still worked before uploading the package, especially
given some previous incidents.
In such case, it is better to upload the package to experimental,
report bugs found in other packages, and then upload to unstable
when the scope of the breakage is better understood.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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