Bug#824358: ITP: freerdp2 -- RDP client/server for Windows Terminal Services

[Andreas Henriksson <andreas@fatal.se>]

Hello Mike Gabriel.

Thanks for looking at packaging a newer freerdp snapshot! I have
some questions and doubts below...

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 12:53:07AM +0200, Mike Gabriel wrote:
[...]
> * Package name    : freerdp2
>   Version         : 2.x (Git snapshot)
[...]
>  The new major upstream version (well, upstream is not tagging versions,
>  but we have one upstream dev on the packaging team who recommends Git
>  snapshots) provides new ABI/API. This new source will supercede the
>  currently available Debian source package "freerdp".

With new API/ABI a transition is needed (and hopefully upstream properly
handles SONAME despite not doing releases), but renaming the source
package is not normally how you do a transition.

>  .
>  From now on, upstream will support parallel installations of multiple
>  major upstream releases.

This bit is quite confusing as you just said upstream doesn't do releases.

>  So shipping both FreeRDP versions in Debian unstable for a while is
>  possible.

Given the lack of followup on existing bug reports do you really
think you have the resources to support multiple versions?!

Please explain a bit more about how you intend to support multiple
versions? For example how do you intend to handle the naming
of pkg-config files, rename or make the -dev packages conflict?

>  However, only freerdp2 will be made available in Debian 9.

Apparently not and you seem to underestimate the amount of work
needed to get something removed from the archive! Are you sure
you'll manage to get down to only one version again before the
stretch release? How?
As mentioned renaming the source package is not how you normally do a
transtion (only when you want to support multiple versions which you
apparently don't want). Please consider handling this like a normal
transition.

>  .
>  Packages depending on FreeRDP shared libraries should start migrating
>  their packages to the new ABI/API for FreeRDP 2.x.

Again, please share some information on how you intend to package
to make it possible to prepare. Likely you're creating extra work
here when not following the normal transition workflow.

>  .
>  A transition bug will be file for monitoring this change-over,
>  once the freerdp2 src:package has landed in unstable.

An automatic tracker would be available on
https://release.debian.org/transitions/
if you followed the normal transition workflow which would be
even better.

Looking forward to hearing more details about your plans to be able to
prepare for the transition.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson