Re: Do we want to Require or Recommend DH
On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 11:08:21PM +0200, gregor herrmann wrote:
> On Mon, 13 May 2019 22:22:32 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>
> > In my experience, keeping existing packages at exotic build systems or
> > ancient dh compat levels causes fewer problems than people trying to
> > change that just for the sake of it.
>
> In my experience ancient debian/rules runes are also a cause for
> repeated RC bugs and the need for NMUs.
>
> Real life example:
> https://tracker.debian.org/media/packages/libm/libmp3-info-perl/changelog-1.24-1.2
>
> Both RC bugs wouldn't have happened with dh(1); and the second NMU
> wouldn't have been necessary if I had switched to dh(1) in the first
> one.
How well are you testing such conversions?
Based on work I've seen from you I'd guess your NMU would be better than
average. Unfortunately this is not generally true.
Based on what enters the archive, "debdiff between old and new package"
already seems to be something that many people are not doing - then
cleaning up after mass-NMUs would be much work.
I have even seen maintainers blindly replacing a complex old
debian/rules with the dh 3-liner, and all the bugfixes and
workarounds in the old one were bugs again.
To show the quantitative side of my argument:
The default change to parallel building in dh compat 10 alone has caused
a three digit number of RC bugs, popping up at a pace of 1-2 RC bugs
per week for several years.
The problem is that anything that works for only 99% of all packages
results in such a high number of new bugs.
Parallel build bugs slipping through an upload can happen,
but maintainers not going through the upgrading checklist
and running debdiff between old and new packages as well
as testing them when doing dh compat bumps is harder to
excuse - and in practice this does happen.
There is no perfect solution here and I also get your point,
what should be taken into consideration is that there is a
tradeoff between the benefits and the regressions of breaking
changes like dh compat bumps or even conversions to dh.
In my experience people are already pushing too much towards
"use dh with latest compat" in existing packages, and it would be
better to slow that down rather than accelerate it even further.
> Cheers,
> gregor
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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