Re: how to compare versions
Hi Matthew,
On Wed, 3 Feb 2010 16:04:13 +1100
Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@debian.org> wrote:
> In short: you don't.
>
> You should make it clear in the NEWS.Debian file that there are
> compatibility issues, and your README.Debian should describe how to perform
> an upgrade manually (or point to upstream documentation for same). Users
> who are specifically interested in upgrade compatibility issues should be
> keeping an eye on the NEWS.Debian file for all the packages they upgrade
> (via apt-listchanges); everyone else is assumed to not be that interested,
> and should expect that incompatible upgrades may occur.
Yes, I should do so.
And I have a question - why should we avoid using pre-depends?
What kind of problem would it cause?
(it doesn't mean I want to use pre-depends, just curious)
> That being said, you should try your best to make upgrading smooth,
> providing compatibility shims and automatic data conversion (as
> appropriate), along with encoraging upstream to take a less cavalier
> approach to their users' expectations (a major version bump should be used
> for a completely incompatible upgrade).
I want to upgrade tomoyo-ccstool package, it is similar to SELinux tools.
TOMOYO system has a security policy to restrict unwanted behaivor, and its
policy has no compatibility (and no conversion program, completely different
from previous one) with versions from 1.6 to 1.7. Upstream has no plan to
create converter or so.
> In the worst possible case, you may want to look at providing both the older
> version of the package and the newer one side-by-side, to allow users to
> run both in parallel and upgrade at their convenience (major software
> packages like apache do this). It is a lot of work (both to do the
> packaging, test the side-by-side operation, and support the old version
> through a stable release without upstream help) so it's not something to be
> undertaken lightly, but it is another option.
Hmm, upstream provides its support for previous version until linux kernel
2.6.31, it's not default version in squeeze. So, I want to replace by
upgrading packages. Anyway just upgrading package may cause problem, I may
consider to provide other package as tomoyo-ccstools1.7 and mention it.
--
Regards,
Hideki Yamane henrich @ debian.or.jp/iijmio-mail.jp
http://wiki.debian.org/HidekiYamane
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