Re: Lintian warnings and compatibility info for backporters
Steffen Moeller <steffen_moeller@gmx.de> writes:
> most lintian warnings are just fine across all versions of Debian. But
> some do introduce incompatibilities for those performing
> backports. Please be so kind to help with an extra field that indicates
> the version of Debian or Ubuntu with which it is (or is not)
> compatible. I came across this issue when getting this error here:
> http://lintian.debian.org/tags/substvar-source-version-is-deprecated.html
We'll try to add some indication of the version number at which such
things apply to the long description, but note that in general Lintian
drops support for oldstable once security support ends. The new substvars
have been supported since etch, and sarge is no longer supported by
Lintian. I realize this does pose a problem for backports to Ubuntu LTS
versions, which are supported for longer than Debian oldstable.
There's a tradeoff here between including some information about when a
recommended feature was added and including version information that's so
obsolete people have to go look it up to realize that they don't care.
Note that there are problems you'll run into with old versions that
Lintian won't warn about, such as missing dependencies on particular
versions of packages. Lintian drops tags recommending particular
versioned dependencies if they're satisfied by oldstable, and sometimes if
they're satisfied by stable.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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