Hi Dima, * Dima Kogan <dkogan@debian.org> [2022-12-02 13:53]:
The reason is that a package that has Build-Depends: debhelper-compat (=13) will fail to build on any older distro. I maintain some tools where I provide packages for a number of distros, and adding such a Build-Depends would mean I need to do extra work to build the packages. One example of such a project is mrcal. It's in Debian, maintained in debian-science. Its debian/control debhelper dependency: https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/mrcal/-/blob/master/debian/control#L7 If a user of another distro wants to install these tools, they can get them from the mrcal APT server. Public instructions: http://mrcal.secretsauce.net/install.html When building packages for the other distros, I generally just sbuild the same tree using the chroot for the target distro. This would fail with debhelper-compat.
From the site those other distros are buster, bullseye, jammy, focal, bionic. For all those debhlper 13 is available (in backports):
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=debhelper&searchon=names&suite=all§ion=all https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=all&searchon=names&keywords=debhelperGiven that new debhelper versions can contain important fixes and that relying on it's magic could create implicit dependencies, I really recommend to use the backported versions.
Cheers Jochen
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