Re: Unsupported packages for Wheezy LTS

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

Hi,

On Thu, 05 Nov 2015, Mike Hommey wrote:
> 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).

Yes, the lack of python 2.7 in squeeze was already what blocked iceweasel
backport in squeeze... the problem will come again and again with other
dependencies.

In general, we must accomodate those requirements and each case needs
to be considered on its own merit, we can either update the main
repository or create a specific bikeshed that we would enable in the
buildd (assuming they come into existence).

For rust, since it's entirely new, we should just introduce it
into wheezy. But when the new upstream version may introduce backwards
compatibility problems, then they are best handled in a bikeshed. That
should probably be the case of new gcc versions as long as we can avoid
having the built packages depend on the specific version available
in the bikeshed (which iceweasel is capable of since it depends only
on libstdc++ from gcc 4.3).

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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