Re: Restructuring roxterm packaging (was Replacing roxterm's multiple binary packages with one)

[Vincent Cheng <vcheng@debian.org>]

Hi Tony,

Sorry, just saw your roxterm RFS and realized that I actually never
got back to you with your latest set of questions.

On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 5:49 AM, Tony Houghton <h@realh.co.uk> wrote:

> That won't cause problems due to the reversed dependencies? One disadvantage
> I can foresee is that this will cause everybody who automatically upgrades
> from version 2.x to have this virtual package installed. Is "Provides"
> definitely the wrong thing to do?

"Provides" (i.e. using virtual packages) is not meant to be used to
facilitate upgrades (Policy 3.6 describes their intended purpose [1]).
Transitional packages with the appropriate depends+breaks+replaces
package inter-relationships is the proper way of renaming packages,
and shouldn't cause any problems if done right.

> If I do use a new dummy package I think it would be a good idea to notify
> users that they can remove it, or is it not important enough to justify
> potentially interrupting the upgrade process? And is NEWS.Debian the correct
> mechanism for such messages?

IMHO if the upgrade process doesn't require any manual user
intervention, there's no point in notifying users via debian/NEWS (I
know apt-listchanges will read debian/NEWS, not sure about
debian/NEWS.Debian). And having packages be renamed shouldn't require
any user intervention (dummy packages can be kept installed
indefinitely and not cause any issues).

On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 6:28 AM, Tony Houghton <h@realh.co.uk> wrote:

> Would it be a good idea to show a message when installing the new dummy
> package, recommending that users remove it, and if so, is NEWS.Debian the
> correct way to do that?

(answered above?)

> And I'm wondering whether it would be better to aim to remove such a
> transitional package quite soon, or keep it until after the next release of
> Debian. I think the latter would help ease upgrades indefinitely, but
> typical roxterm users are probably more likely to track testing or unstable
> than to only upgrade at stable Debian releases.

Please keep the transitional package around for at least one full
release cycle. It's not safe to assume that all roxterm users only
track testing/unstable, and there's little cost to you as maintainer
to keep around a dummy package to facilitate oldstable->stable
upgrades (nothing more than an extra binary package stanza in
d/control, really) so that stable users can have painfree upgrades.

Regards,
Vincent

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-binary.html#s-virtual_pkg