Re: Octave 4.4.1 transition

["John W. Eaton" <jwe@octave.org>]

On 08/20/2018 03:34 PM, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm about to upload Octave 4.4.1 to experimental. Uploading to unstable
> is not possible because there is a (rather unexpected) SOVERSION bump.
>
> This means that we have to go through another transition (which should
> be relatively straightforward though).
>
> Until this transition can be completed, the status of Octave in testing
> and unstable is rather bad:
> – testing/buster has version 4.4.0-3, affected by #904855 (FTBFS with
> Qt 5.11)
> – unstable/sid has version 4.4.1~rc2-3, affected by #906047 (plplot
> FTBFS because of the -rc2 string in Octave version number)

Once Octave 5 is released, at least this problem should go away because 
we are changing the numbering scheme for releases and won't be using 
-rcN numbers for test releases.

> I'm wondering whether uploading to unstable a targeted quick fix for
> #906047 would be a good idea: on one hand, it would allow fixing all RC
> bugs before the transition is completed; on the other hand, it could
> cause ABI issues (because 4.4.1~rc2 does not have the SOVERSION bump
> but probably already has the ABI break, though I did not check).

Sorry about the change in SOVERSION.  We try to avoid that, but this 
time there were some important bugs that I couldn't see how to fix 
without making some interface changes.

If a similar situation should happen again in the future, would it at 
least avoid some trouble if I changed the version before the release 
candidate?

jwe