Re: Status of antlr4 in Debian

[Emmanuel Bourg <ebourg@apache.org>]

Hi Pierre,

Le 26/10/2022 à 16:47, Pierre Gruet a écrit :

> My question is: apart from time to work on the package, is there any 
> reason we should remain with antlr4 4.7.2 in Debian although 4.11.1 has 
> been released upstream?

Yes, antlr is the kind of package you don't want to upgrade, because 
it's likely to break another package and debugging a language grammar 
without upstream consent is really the last thing you want to do. So as 
long as it works, I'm not touching it :)

The safe way to upgrade antlr4 is to:
- check the version used by the reverse dependencies
- if the lowest version used is above the package version, then upgrade
- if the version you need is still higher, checkout the project, update 
the antlr dependency and run the upstream test suite (not from the 
Debian package build since tests are sometime disabled)
- if all goes well, upgrade the antl4 package
- if if not, clone the package to keep the previous version (we had to 
do this with antlr 3.2)

Good luck!

Emmanuel Bourg