Hi everybody,the whole project has the systemd-discussion and we discuss about the packaging of fis-gtm :-). So let me ask some questions and I hope they haven't been asked before ...
More precisely we are talking about versions:
fis-gtm-6.0 (currently in Debian)
fis-gtm-6.1 (recently released upstream)
fis-gtm-6.2 (to be released upstream by mid 2014)
Assuming that these packages are in unstable and a security or grave bug will be found that affects all versions. As far as I understood only a new version fis-gtm-6.3 will be released. All other version remain unchanged. How are the Debian users informed that there is a new package with an important bugfix available? As the old package won't get an update, nobody will notice. Does the Debian Med team has to create backports of the bugfix? Or do the buggy packages need to disappear from the archive? The latter needs some action from the ftpmaster, who are surely not happy to be involved in maintaining packages.
Now lets assume that these three versions are part of stable and versions 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2 are in unstable. How do we handle bugfixes in this case? Normally the packages in stable only get a minimal patch to fix the bug. Does the release team agree to put version 7.3 into stable? In case of a bug affecting all versions since 6.0 we have to deal with six packages now. This would be nine in case 6.0 moves to oldstable. Is this a task the Debian Med team can handle?
I think we need to find a solution for all these problems before uploading the new version ...
Thorsten