Does partial upgrade between stable and testing must be supported ?

[Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml@free.fr>]

  Hi everybody,

  In #704805, there is a disagreement between the maintainer of R software
and several other people (me included).

  R software is packaged into a lots of different Debian packages (with
different maintainers) along with the main R package (r-base-core).
Due to internal changes, the r-base-core in testing (currently 3.0.3-1)
does not work with lots of r packages in stable (compiled with
the r-base-core of stable, ie 2.15.1-4).
  I think that everybody (bug submitters and maintainer) agree with that.

  The disagreement comes from the fact that the maintainer does not
think that he must declare this incompatibility.
  For now, if you install a r package from testing, it will pull
the r-base-core from testing (due to dependency such as
"Depends: r-base-core (>= 3.0.2-1)")
  But, when r-base-core from testing is installed, the system keeps
other r related packages from stable (no conflict, break, ...)
and these packages won't work anymore.

  The maintainer think that he does not need to do anything about
that. People should just upgrade all their packages from stable to
testing when r-base-core is upgraded.
  Other people (and me) disagree and think that other broken r-related
packages must be either removed or upgraded automatically by apt
when r-base-core is upgraded (due to additional conflicts/breaks/...
declarations)

On 05/04/2014 15:16, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> |   Currently, R is unusable with partial upgrade between stable and
> | testing. However, this is something that we must support (and that have
> | a severity above normal)
> 
> Not ideal but I don't think that partially upgrades between stable and
> testing are a goal of the project or distribution. The goal is to get testing
> where we can cut a new stable. If current testing works...

  I'm interested by having more inputs on this point, hence my mail
to d-d.

  Regards,
    Vincent

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