Re: virtual/alternative B-D (was Re: libtiff5 transition)
Sune Vuorela <nospam@vuorela.dk> wrote:
> On 2013-12-06, Thorsten Glaser <tg@debian.org> wrote:
>> Hm indeed. Makes me wonder whether it would not be better to make
>> libtiff-dev the real package and abandon libtiffN-dev altogether.
>> (Never understood why the -dev packages need the numbers, anyway.)
>
> The -dev packages needs numbers if you want to have several around at
> the same time.
My original proposal to debian-release was to drop libtiff4-dev and
libtiff5-dev completely and to change the name of libtiff5-dev to
libtiff-dev, but this makes it too hard to actually do the transition
because too many packages become FTBFS for too long. You can see my
original suggestion and subsequent discussion in bug 717923. Sorry
about the suggestion to build-depend on a versioned virtual package.
When we changed what the package was being called, I forgot to update
that in my notes of what I was going to say. Many months elapsed
between the original discussion and the uploads, and I just forgot about
that detail.
I think it would be best for people to avoid versioned dependencies on
libtiff*-dev. The only reason to do it might be as a hint to
backporters that they can't backport to a version of debian that doesn't
have a libtiff5-dev alternative available to it. I think it would be
best to just change all the build dependencies to libtiff-dev, but
package maintainers and/or backporters should probably know what to do
in those relatively rare cases where tiff 4.x is required. Most of
those cases are going to GIS and similar applications, some of which may
be using libgeotiff anyway, since that's where BIGTIFF is especially
needed. Other packages, like vips (which I also happen to maintain),
will detect with ./configure whether a tiff 4.x is in use and will use
new functionality if available but will fall back if not. So if someone
backported vips and ended up using a tiff 3.x version, they'd get a
working package without BIGTIFF support.
Perhaps after the dust settles and tiff3 is gone, I can rename
libtiff5-dev to libtiff-dev, but that would break packages with
versioned dependencies on libtiff5-dev and not provide much more than
aesthetic benefit, so I'm not sure that it's worth it.
--
Jay Berkenbilt <qjb@debian.org>
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