Re: Renaming linux-2.6 source package, keeping bugs
On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 01:39:20PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> Since Linux 3.x is a continuation of the 2.6.x series and not a major
> change, there was no need to create a new source package for it.
> However, we should now rename the source package to 'linux'.
>
> Currently, most of our bugs are assigned to 'linux-2.6' or
> 'src:linux-2.6' so that version-tracking works across binary package
> name changes. But if we rename the source package as well, these bugs
> will presumably be seen to apply only to versions before the name
> change, or only after. How can we avoid this?
The good news is that I don't think this should require fundamental
redesign work in order to work gracefully. The bad news is that I think
it is going to require some work.
The format used for version records should permit a source package to
change its name, as long as you preserve the old information in the
changelog. For instance, the version file for linux-2.6 currently
starts:
linux-2.6/3.0.0-3 linux-2.6/3.0.0-2 linux-2.6/3.0.0-1
... so it could become:
linux/3.0.0-4 linux-2.6/3.0.0-3 linux-2.6/3.0.0-2 linux-2.6/3.0.0-1
So, I think what you need is for the bugs to be reassigned to linux or
src:linux, but also keep the old version tracking information which
indicates that the bug was found in (say) linux-2.6/3.0.0-1. debbugs
will know that linux/3.0.0-4 is descended from linux-2.6/3.0.0-1 and so
things should keep on working. A normal reassign would discard the
version tracking information and you'd have to reapply it afterwards,
which would be tedious and error-prone. Perhaps we need to implement a
form of reassign that doesn't discard version tracking information, or
perhaps we should simply do this by hacking the database in bulk.
We might need some work to make pkgreport.cgi?src=linux&dist=stable work
gracefully. What I think ought to happen is that it should take the
version record for linux and realise that it is descended from a source
package called linux-2.6 that's still in stable, and look up the
appropriate version for that; but I don't recall implementing anything
that clever and I suspect that this does not yet work.
We'll also need to consider what happens for users of stable who'll
continue to report bugs and expect reportbug to be able to show them
listings and so forth. Given the number of bugs involved, perhaps we
need to teach debbugs that "linux-2.6" should be considered as an alias
for "linux" for the purposes of queries and of input to submit@ and
control@.
Ben, do you have any constraints on the timeline for this that we should
know about?
Don, what do you think about all this? I think it's tractable, but it
feels like a pretty solid weekend's work to me.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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