Re: Unsupported packages for Wheezy LTS

[Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org>]

On Wed, Nov 04, 2015 at 05:44:36PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> [ Many people are on copy, please trim the list as appropriate when you reply ]
> 
> On Wed, 19 Aug 2015, Moritz Muehlenhoff wrote:
> > These need to be discussed, since they will be a significant
> > time drain (e.g. are they in the sponsors's interests?). They
> > are supportable, but it will take a lot of work and sometimes
> > special domain knowledge:
> > 
> > icedove
> > iceweasel
> > qemu
> > qemu-kvm
> > xen
> > libvirt
> > ffmpeg -> libav
> > vlc
> > rails -> several split packages (only the 3.2 packages are supported in wheezy)
> 
> Nobody commented here but I believe that we should aim to support them.
> Except vlc, they are all used by some of the current sponsors (even though
> they are not currently supported in squeeze).
> 
> It would be good to identify Debian maintainers with the required "special
> domain knowledge" for all those packages so that they can be paid to
> take care of those packages when the need arises (cf
> https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts-details.html#join for
> details about requirement for paid contributors).

Speaking for iceweasel, backports to wheezy are not a significant
overhead compared to packaging for unstable and stable-security.

With that being said, the fact that we're backporting new upstream
ESR releases is going to have its own problems sooner or later, related
to the toolchains. First and foremost, while GCC 4.7 is the current
minimum version supported, it's likely to become GCC 4.8 in the near
future, because of some wanted C++11/C++14 features. Second, Firefox is
soon going to require the rust compiler, which we have no package for
except in unstable.

So there should be a discussion about what we do about those toolchains
first (and that's a broader discussion to have than LTS).

Mike