Bug#893133: Could we maintain compatibility with older debhelpers to ease backporting

[Yaroslav Halchenko <debian@onerussian.com>]

Package: singularity-container
Version: 2.4.2-4
Severity: wishlist

Dear Afif

Thanks for maintaining and updating the package through the latest releases.
But I wondered -- since you also had similar (minor but still) pains -- could
we retain/maintain compatibility with previous versions of debhelper, e.g. 10
(or even better 9, which I believe still supported by debhelper in sid).

I am asking because we try to autobuild backports of singularity for all still
supported debian and ubuntu releases in neurodebian:
http://neuro.debian.net/pkgs/singularity-container.html and that is why I
am typically trying to maintain compatibility to avoid need to patch etc, which
becomes painful and thus inefficient.

I see that motivation to jump to 11 from 9 was:

    $> git log debian/compat
    commit 01fd7b1b0ab23b03b424e567342dec180b45e2d7
    Author: Afif Elghraoui <afif@debian.org>
    Date:   Sat Feb 17 15:55:58 2018 -0500

        debhelper compat 11

        Since 10, it's no longer necessary to manually pass `--with-autoreconf`
        or explicitly depend on the autoreconf debhelper plugin.
        The package build is also parallel by default. We'll have to force
        serial build if that becomes a problem.

which I would think is just to make better use of available features of recent
debhelper, and not really due to "demand/necessity".  Would you mind if I
revert it, and thus simplify backporting for both of us? ;)

Thanks in advance for the consideration

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (600, 'unstable'), (300, 'experimental'), (100, 'unstable-debug'), (100, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.15.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages singularity-container depends on:
ii  libc6           2.27-1
ii  python          2.7.14-4
ii  squashfs-tools  1:4.3-5

Versions of packages singularity-container recommends:
ii  e2fsprogs  1.43.9-2

singularity-container suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information