Re: Removing transition stuff in debhelper scripts after which time?
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 04:46:43AM +0200, Daniel Leidert wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Today I stumbled over the question: After which time should transition
> stuff be removed from the debhelper scripts. In this special case I'm
> talking about install-sgmlcatalog calls in (e.g.) postinst scripts. Adam
> Di Carlo announced the depreciation of install-sgmlcatalogs in 2001.
> However, almost all related docbook* packages still contain this stuff.
> So I'm wondering, how long one should wait before such obsolete stuff
> can be removed? I mean, there is no requirement to support updates from
> e.g. Woody to Lenny, right? I checked the Debian Social Contract and the
> Policy manuals, but didn't find an information related to this topic.
> Maybe I overlooked it?
You can drop such things in uploads to unstable after they're included
in a stable release. Upgrades across releases are not tested and are
officially "not supported" though AFAIK the reasons are largely
undocumented. I think it's roughly the same situation as for
downgrades:
. maintainer scripts may not support things; this is basically so
maintainers are allowed to drop support for ancient things and not
have unmanagably large and difficult to test, unmaintanble cruft;
. Package control file; including in particular the dependency
fields: Conflicts, Depends, Provides (?), Pre-Depend plus Replaces.
Dependencies on versions earlier than [old]stable are often
dropped. It's only unfortunate that control files afaik still
don't support comments to document why the versions and things were
there with which to being.
. The package itself; eg. it might contain logic to upgrade the
format of its datafiles but not for every historic version and bugs
therein.
Justin
References
[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2007/01/msg00241.html
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