Re: MRs on salsa and letting janitor automate things

[Dima Kogan <dkogan@debian.org>]

Hi.

Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org> writes:

> IMHO its sensible to follow the latest toolset version sooner or
> later. There are several sensible features and if your packages are
> vanilla and simple there is no good reason to stick to any specific
> debhelper compat version.

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.

(Well, I need to update debian/changelog too, but I shouldn't have to do
that either. One issue at a time)