Re: Updating xloadimage to libtiff5

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

On 2013-09-30 15:50, Dominik George wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have prepared xloadimage for upload to assume maintainership for it,
> and the PTS tells me I should prepare it for the libtiff5 transition.
> 
> My understanding is that I should make it build against libtiff5 rather
> than libtiff4, and that is what I did. My understanding is that this
> will bring forward the transition.
> 
> However, my sponsor says that the libtiff5 transition means that I must
> under no circumstances upload any changes that deal with libtiff.
> 
> Could you please explain to me what is the correct way of dealing with
> the libtiff5 transition?
> 
> Cheers,
> Nik
> 

Hi,

In your "average transition", ensuring your package in sid can be
rebuilt against the (new) version of the library and is able to migrate
is desirable[1].  Failing that, being ready to upload a patched version
that builds against the new version of the library (and otherwise be
ready to migrate, see [1]) is a good fallback.

Once the transition starts, packages should be rebuild (usually binNMUs
or, where those fail/does not work, sourceful uploads).  After that, we
prefer to wait for binaries to migrate.  Once testing contains the
rebuild binaries, packages are usually (but not always) out of the
transition.  We consider a transition complete when the old shared
library package has been removed from testing (in this case, that would
be libtiff4).

Now, I am not sure tiff counts as your "average transition".  Since it
involves two source packages instead of just one.  If your (patched)
package can be build against either the new or the old version of
libtiff, then I suspect an upload is not a problem at this time.

But disclaimer; I am not in charge of that transition[2].

~Niels

[1] It should not introduce new RC bugs, have out of date binaries etc.

[2] Actually, I am not sure anyone of us have picked it up yet.