Re: Bug#1095791: dpkg: incompatible and Policy-violating R³ default change breaks packages’ builds

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Fri, 2025-02-14 at 01:02:26 +0100, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Feb 2025, Sean Whitton wrote:
> >Policy has to go through binary-NEW in order to be released.  So there
> 
> Technicalities.

Not really, no.

> >This bug does not count as RC just because Debian upload bureaucracy
> >hasn't been performed yet.
> 
> If packagers cannot rely on Policy to give correct information, what
> *can* they rely on?

This is not how Debian Policy has ever worked. By that measure
packages could not rely on multiarch or triggers to name a coupled
of examples. And Policy changes in general tend to be done after the
changes have been implemented and deployed in the archive.

> Or, if you absolutely must cause more useless churn on package
> maintainers, at least forbid not setting R³. But don’t silently
> change the default to an incompatible value.

The problem that triggered this report was only surfaced by the R³
change, but it is not really directly affected by it. The real problem
is that the R³ change made it possible to skip calling the
«debian/rules build» targets, where the affected package was already
Policy buggy, but the breakage was not visible. If the R³ default
would get reverted, but the change to call
«fakeroot debian/rules binary-arch» kept, the openjdk-8 package would
still misbuild.

Thanks,
Guillem