[debhelper-devel] Bug#747141: Bug#747141: ping

[Niels Thykier]

Dima Kogan:
> Niels Thykier <niels at thykier.net> writes:
> 
>> The issue in geda-gaf cannot be solved in debhelper correctly.  Please
>> have a look at #766711 to understand the reasoning.
>>
>> Basically:
>>  * We can only support two style of binNMUs: arch:all -> arch:all OR
>>    arch:any -> arch: any.  Anything else will break.
>>  * Compat 10 and later will forbid possibly broken setups.  We tried to
>>    retro fit it into compat 9 and earlier, but it broke in unintended
>>    ways (we could not reliably detect the issues).
> 
> Hi. Thanks for the reply.

Hi,

You are welcome. :)

> Like you say, "at first glance" (pkg =
> ${source:Version}) would work for this specific case, and that's what
> the second patch here does.
> 

FTR, the ${source:Version} is only true for arch:any -> arch:all; for
all "valid" cases, a ${binary:Version} solves it (${source:Version} does
not work for an arch:any -> arch:any).  Finally, there is no solution
for arch:all -> arch:any.

> Clearly I haven't thought about this as much as you have, and if it
> really looks unfixable, it'd be great if
> 
> - An attempt to make a broken binNMU would hard-fail instead of throwing
>   an easily-missed warning
> 

This is what we introduced in compat 10 and later.

> - The error message has a link to this and related bugs
> 

I suppose this could be done as well.

> Currently dh_installdocs throws an error if compat != 9. Is it
> acceptable to make it fail even for compat == 9?
> 

The release team rejected that on the grounds that too many packages
might start to FTBFS. I should mention last time this was considered was
during the jessie freeze, so it would have been rather unhelpful for
them at that time.

I attempted to support detection of the binNMU case and abort on only on
that (so we got a warning on a regular build and a FTBFS on binNMU
rather than a broken package).  Unfortunately, it did not work so well.

In the end I settled with fixing it for compat 10.

Thanks,
~Niels