Re: Facilitating external repositories
Hi Wouter,
2015-06-12 0:59 GMT+02:00 Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>:
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 12:38:29PM +0200, Bálint Réczey wrote:
>> Hi Wouter,
>>
>> 2015-06-07 23:31 GMT+02:00 Wouter Verhelst <w@uter.be>:
>> > On Sun, Jun 07, 2015 at 07:43:30PM +0200, Bálint Réczey wrote:
>> >> I think this situation still allows maintaining the packages in
>> >> Debian, when (if ever) your contract ends and you don't want to
>> >> maintain the packages in your free time you can orphan the packages.
>> >> The next maintainer could adopt the packages then.
>> >
>> > Sure, in theory. There are, however, also a few practical reasons why I
>> > don't want to go down that route (that is, the reasons why I chose to
>> > allow beid be dropped from Debian in 2010 still apply).
>> I have reread the thread twice but I could not find details of the
>> practical reasons.
>
> That would be because they're not mentioned there :-)
>
>> Could you please share them? A link would be enough if I just missed it.
>
> - I don't want to have to deal with doing a maven build in a Debian
> package. If you see what the packages' debian/rules do, ou'll see that
> we cheat for eid-viewer.
This does not sound like building a binary we could trust.
> - The packages exist mostly to support cards that have a limited
> validity. When they're no longer valid, you return the old one and get
> a new one. Sometimes, it happens that the newer cards have a bug, or
> have a new feature, or some such, which means that the old version of
> the software doesn't really work anymore, and you need a new one.
> Having older versions in the archive for years after they stop working
> turned out to be a support nightmare for upstream.
I think with wheezy-backports the situation improved a lot. The application
could check if *-backports is enabled and warn the user if it is not. You could
keep updated versions in *-backports, thus avoiding the nightmare.
Cheers,
Balint
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