Advice on handling a major upload
Greetings everyone.
I've been maintaining WebGUI (webgui) under 'collab-maint' for over
three years now, taking it from 7.5.17 to its current 7.10.23 version,
with Gregor being my usual packaging nitpicker and upload sponsor. Most
of the Perl modules I maintain with the group are required by WebGUI;
some of them have been updated by the group before I even noticed they
were, so thank you all.
This 7.10 branch is considered 'stable' by upstream and I expect to have
no less than a dozen minor upgrades in the next six to eight months.
I've personally submited several performance patches that are waiting
for 2012's first release. So there's still a lot of work here, and a lot
of installations that will be using 7.10 for a while.
However, there's currently a strong ongoing effort upstream to release
WebGUI 8.0: it's expected for late august. This is more than a major
release. Even though there is a smooth data-upgrade path from 7.10 to
8.0 in the same way this has worked *flawlessly* since 6.x on, a lot of
things have changed, the main one being that WebGUI is now Plack-based
instead of mod_perl-based, so a lot of dependencies are going away and
several installation alternatives are available.
I believe it is a good idea to have two packages, webgui and webgui8.
WebGUI 7.10 will have maintenance and support at least for six months
after WebGUI 8 becomes oficially stable. The webgui package has been
working in Sid for over a year now (I have several production
installations) and I'm hoping will be available in wheezy. But I'm not
sure what will be the proper and practical way to handle webgui8.
That's why I'd like your takes on this issue, before I start branching
and working out the details. WebGUI8 still needs a few dependencies
packaged to be usable in Sid, but I'm working with upstream to clean up
unneeded complexity before packaging them (the needed modules are also
written by the WebGUI folks, just not in Debian yet).
Thanks in advance.
--
Ernesto Hernández-Novich - @iamemhn - Unix: Live free or die!
Geek by nature, Linux by choice, Debian of course.
If you can't aptitude it, it isn't useful or doesn't exist.
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