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

On 02/07/15 20:49, Vincent Cheng wrote:

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.
OK. I tried Provides in the chroot, because I didn't interpret the policy manual as forbidding it for this purpose, but I found it didn't have the desired effect anyway. 


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).
OK. I had decided not to do that anyway. Sorry about the partially duplicate post. I lost connectivity to my IMAP server while posting the first one and didn't realise the SMTP had succeeded. 


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.


Good, that again confirms what I thought.
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