Peter Samuelson wrote:
> It's pretty clear that this is social engineering. The dpkg
> maintainers want to force every package maintainer to _think_ about
> which source format they wish to use. To ensure that, in the long run,
> you no longer have the choice to simply ignore the format war.
I wonder if anything can be learned from debhelper's history of
compatability levels.
numpkgs compat level introduced deprecated
1 8 Jun 2010
6625 7 Apr 2008
675 6 Jan 2008
5398 5 Nov 2005
1638 4 Apr 2002 Mar 2009
156 3 Feb 2001 Nov 2005
25 2 Jul 2000 Jun 2005
25 1 Sep 1997 Jun 2005
557 unknown[1] Sep 1997 Jun 2005
[1] No debian/compat or DH_COMPAT currently means compat level 1 is used.
A few hundred of these packages do not use debhelper at all; I don't
have the exact number handy.
Some points I'd draw from this data and what I remember about how the
numbers used to look:
* About 50% of packages switched to the newest version in just a couple of
years, without me being too annoying with deprecation messages, or making
any changes that forced the switch.
* Deprecation warnings seem to do a good job of gradually eroding the
number of holdouts after the initial switch rush. (The relatively
large number of packages still using v4 is probably because it was
the "best" level for a long period (2002-2005), and only started
deprecation warnings a year ago.)
* After a certian point, one has to take action to get rid of the last
few packages in the long tail. It would be pretty easy at this point
for me to get rid of v2 and v3 entirely. But still probably not worth
the effort, as it would only remove a few dozen lines of code from
debhelper. The time is better spent getting rid of individual
deprecated debhelper commands.
* At this point, mandating a version number at the cost of breaking a
few hundred packages might be worth it, though mostly because it would
probably cause half of them to update away from v1.
* If I had mandated a version when v2 was introduced, I would have
caused many long threads on debian-devel, and would probably now have
to contend with a lump of packages using v2 (or yada) instead of the
current lump at v1.
--
see shy jo
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