Bug#683847: unblock: sgml-base/1.26+nmu4

[Samuel Bronson <naesten@gmail.com>]

Julien Cristau <jcristau@debian.org> writes:

> On Tue, Oct  9, 2012 at 10:56:41 +0200, Helmut Grohne wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Oct 09, 2012 at 09:23:20AM +0200, Julien Cristau wrote:
>> > Get rid of the triggers and get back to something that actually works.
>> 
>> I believe that you are a bit late into this discussion. Initially I
>> proposed[63] a solution not involving triggers in the spirit of minimal
>> changes. Then Daniel Leidert being a member of the XML/SGML Group
>> requested[78] that the package catalogs be created at build time and be
>> shipped as conffiles. Later Joey Hess[164] requested that the central
>> catalog be generated using triggers. At that time both requests made
>> sense (and to me they still do). There were no objections and I did not
>> see the dpkg conffile trigger issue #676062 coming. So I implemented
>> both.
>> 
>> The current state is that there are no non-transition issues left. Once
>> you are on sid, there are no sgml-base specific rc bugs affecting you.
>> Going "back" will not make the transitioning part any easier. At least I
>> don't see how that would work, but maybe your yet hidden solution can
>> surprise me?
>> 
> I'm not interested in "you are on sid" so much as "you're upgrading from
> squeeze to wheezy".  And considering the amount of bugs this whole thing
> has uncovered (whether in the transition stuff itself, in dpkg, or
> somewhere else) I'm fairly convinced this whole thing is in the "not
> worth it" category.  And even in the "you've already upgraded"
> situation, dpkg's failing at trigger handling means I'm fairly nervous
> about the next dist-upgrade.

Well, considering that we never actually *had* anything that worked, and
that the transition in question is complete *in wheezy* (the only
remaining calls to update-catalog in maintscripts are in sgml-base's own
postinst and prerm scripts), what you're asking for amounts to a *new*
transition, in which we:

  1. Patch debhelper *again*,
  
     * putting back the update-catalog calls

     * possibly adding code to transition /etc/*.cat away from being
       conffiles (you wouldn't want to break those of us already *on*
       wheezy, would you?)

     * but still making sure not to trash the user's edits to those
       file like we used to

  2. In coordination, remove the triggers from sgml-base

  3. bin-NMU sgml-base's rdepends *again* to get all that hairy logic
     back into the maintscripts

(Note that I'm using "we" and "us" in a strange way that only includes
myself in capacities like "being on wheezy"; no way am I smart enough to
concoct working debhelper fragments for this, or figure out how to zap
the triggers without breaking anything...)

And furthermore, if the new mainscript fragments turn out to be buggy
(which seems likely, considering how hairy the things you're asking them
to do are) it will be necessary to *repeat* tasks 1 and 3, possibly more
than once!

And all this, just to avoid a Pre-Depends: dpkg (>= version), which
seems to be a fairly well-accepted sort of pre-depends for packages
sufficiently well away from the transitive closure of the essential
packages?

Anyway, *someone* should probably do *something* here...

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