Re: Maintaining all of the testing-cabal packages under the OpenStack team

[Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com>]

On June 29, 2020 10:12:49 AM UTC, Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org> wrote:
>On 6/29/20 8:34 AM, Ondrej Novy wrote:
...
>>     More over, mock debhelper was upgraded to 13, for no apparent
>reason
>>     (yet another "cosmetic fix" that isn't helping?). I'd like to
>remind
>>     everyone that, increasing debhelper compat version to a number
>that
>>     isn't in stable, without a specific reason (like the need of a
>specific
>>     feature that wasn't there before) is just annoying for anyone
>>     maintaining backports. That's truth even for when debhelper
>itself is
>>     backported to oldstable (it's always nicer to be able to build a
>>     backport without requiring another backport at build time).
>> 
>> nope, this is not true. Using the newest debhelper compat level is
>> recommended, see man page. There is no reason to __not__ upgrade
>> debhelper compat level. I will always upgrade debhelper in my
>packages
>> to the newest debhelper as soon as possible. Please newer downgrade
>> debhelper in my packages again without asking.
>
>I don't agree this is best practice when backports are to be expected.

I'm substantially less enthusiastic about bumping compat levels than Ondrej, but since debhelper 13 is available in buster-backports, backporting is unrelated to whether it's a good idea or not.

Scott K