Hi Gregoa As I was involved, I'm trying to do some comments. On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 10:46:05AM -0400, gregor herrmann wrote: > During the last weeks we've seen two changes: > > * debhelper compat level 8 (still experimental) prefers Module::Build > over EUMM. We've traditionally expressed a build dependency on M::B > by using "perl (>= 5.10) | libmodule-build-perl". > When we want to change to compat 8 we either need to add this all > over the place or accept the fact that the package won't build in > oldstable (perl 5.8). - Several people on IRC said they were fine > with dropping support for etch at this point in time. > * The second development is that oldstable is removed from the > archive now, which supports the point of not supporting it any more > :) > > I've been thinking about this a bit and I'd like to write down a > general rule for the future. Our group policy seems the appropriate > place to add that and how long we want to support building on old > releases (if possible by the dependencies, of course). > > Here's a quick draft: > > #v+ > Index: policy.pod > =================================================================== > --- policy.pod (revision 60739) > +++ policy.pod (working copy) > @@ -107,6 +107,35 @@ > Contains the list of contributors to the specific package, i.e. persons > interested in co-maintaining it in the future. > > +=item Build and runtime dependencies > + > +We try to support backporting our packages to oldstable/stable where > +possible. This effects handling of dual-lifed modules and versioned (build) > +dependencies. Agree. In my opinion this however should not 'block' us from using new packaging features, e.g. maybe a bit too easy example was the possible switch from including quilt framework in debian/rules via the addons for dh, which needed us to Build-Depends on debhelper (>= 7.0.8) and quilt (>= 0.46-7). > +At some point (usually a year after a release) oldstable will be removed > +from the archive; at that point support for backporting to oldstable becomes > +moot. I think too, as soon oldstable moves to the archive, we can then begin adapting the above 'policy' and move away from trying to support oldstable backporting, to a more like 'nice to have'. This means *not* "we don't care anymore", but may help us maybe remaining in the development with too new features of our packaing tools. Bests Salvatore
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