Re: Roadmap for the 1.15.x series

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Fri, 21 Aug 2009, Guillem Jover wrote:
> Some of those items should be done for squeeze or we'll need to wait for
> a new release cycle before being able to use them fully (like multiarch
> and the conffile support), others could get postponed if squeeze gets an
> early freeze. So please do share yours as well, so that we can send a
> mail afterwards to the relese team, with the items that we'd really
> want to get done for squeeze.

Support of xz compression would be nice to have so that people could use it
in squeeze+1. This concerns .deb and .dsc.

I would have liked to be able to update dpkg-source to generate new source
formats by default but we need:
- that it be deployed on ftp-master (it sucks that ftpmasters are
  sitting on my patch and don't want to merge it before they finished
  their sqlalchemy rewrite)
- that most of the reported bugs about conversion failure are fixed
  http://wiki.debian.org/Projects/DebSrc3.0

So it's unlikely that those changes are doable in time.

> The main trend in my mind is to merge back functionality implemented
> elsewhere, and ideally an eventual deprecation of some of those other
> implementations.

Is it sorted by priority? Because I doubt that you/we can do everything
and you'll have to make choices.

> * Make dpkg.deb contain only sh and C programs (to help embedded distros,
>   to make it possible to remove perl-base from essential) [c-rewrite]:

I might be interested to help here but I'm not sure how much time I can
devote to this project.

> * New perl modules package [libdpkg-perl]:

I should really take the primary responsibility for this one.

> * Extend conffile support, merge back ucf:
> 
>   - Store conffiles at install time.
>     <http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Dpkg/Proposals/ConffileDatabase>
>   - Support registering configuration files.
>   - Add a new dpkg-conffile to handle conffiles (view, diff, rm,
>     restore, etc).

It would at least be nice to be able to get the work of Sean integrated
and maybe be more interactive with him (i.e. review his work regularly)
so that he could take the responsibility of implementing more of the
related goals.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog