Re: Head's up: Debian Policy 3.9.3 release planned for 2012-02-22

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net> writes:

> Thanks for the heads up - I suspect we are also a bit overdue on a
> Lintian release.  :)  I had a quick look at the git shortlog and from
> what I can tell Lintian is pretty much up to speed so far[1].

> [1] Admittedly I only noticed some /run, DEP-5 and some multi-arch
> stuff.

Here's the draft upgrading-checklist:

     2.4
          New archive sections _education_, _introspection_, and
          _metapackages_ added.

     5.6.8
          The `Architecture' field in `*.dsc' files may now contain the
          value `any all' for source packages building both
          architecture-independent and architecture-dependent packages.

     7.1
          If a dependency is restricted to particular architectures, the
          list of architectures must be non-empty.

     9.1.1
          `/run' is allowed as an exception to the FHS and replaces
          `/var/run'.  `/run/lock' replaces `/var/lock'.  The FHS
          requirements for the older directories apply to these directories
          as well.  Backward compatibility links will be maintained and
          packages need not switch to referencing `/run' directly yet.
          Files in `/run' should be stored in a temporary file system.

     9.1.4
          New section spelling out the requirements for packages that use
          files in `/run', `/var/run', or `/var/lock'.  This generalizes
          information previously only in 9.3.2.

     9.5
          Cron job file names must not contain `.'  or `+' or they will be
          ignored by cron.  They should replace those characters with `_'.
          If a package provides multiple cron job files in the same
          directory, they should each start with the package name (possibly
          modified as above), `-', and then some suitable prefix.

     9.10
          Packages using doc-base do not need to call install-docs anymore.

     10.7.4
          Packages that declare the same `conffile' may see left-over
          configuration files from each other even if they conflict.

     11.8
          The Policy rules around Motif libraries were just a special case
          of normal rules for non-free dependencies and were largely
          obsolete, so they have been removed.

     12.5
          `debian/copyright' is no longer required to list the Debian
          maintainers involved in the creation of the package (although
          note that the requirement to list copyright information is
          unchanged).

     mime
          Retire this separate document and merge its (short) contents into
          Policy section 9.7.  There are no changes to the requirements.

     perl
          Packages may declare an interest in the <perl-major-upgrade>
          trigger to be notified of major upgrades of perl.

     virtual
          `ttf-japanese-{mincho, gothic}' is renamed to
          `fonts-japanese-{mincho, gothic}'.

> If I recall correctly you were considering to drop the
> "missing-symbols-file" for C++ libraries?

Yeah.  The alternative would be to make it wishlist/wild-guess for C++,
but my experience was that it wasn't an issue with some C++ libraries, but
rather that the current state of the tools and symbol handling make this a
not particularly sane thing to do for more like 90% of libraries.  I'm not
sure that's accurate, but it's the reaction I came away with.

At the very least, trying to maintain the file without something like
pkg-kde-tools strikes me as very difficult.

So, my inclination is to drop the tag for C++ until such time as the tools
are better.  I filed a set of bugs against pkg-kde-tools that would
improve the situation.

> Was the conclusion of #659574 to downgrade the tag to "pedantic"?  If
> so, I might do it if I get a sudden urge to write some tests.

Yes, I think that's the right thing to do.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>