[Debian-hebrew-common] Do we need an upgrade package?

[Shachar Shemesh]

Hi all,


A while back the Debian Hebrew team packaged "thunderbird-bidiui". It's
a Thunderbird extension the user to set the paragraph direction inside
emails sent. Packaging took some effort, especially because upstream had
to clarify the license and because they don't have an official source
published, and didn't allow checking out from CVS on a tag to anonymous
users.


Having said that, all problems were, eventually, solved, and source
package "bidiui-0.7.3-1", creating Architecture: All package
"thunderbird-bidiui-0.7.3-1" was finally uploaded to Sid.


A couple of days later, way before the package was added to the
overrides file, the rename of Thunderbird to Icedove took place. The
bidiui package now had the wrong dependencies, wrong directory layout
and wrong name. I emailed the FTP masters asking what to upload as an
alternative (i.e. - whether to create an upgrade dummy
"thunderbird-bidiui"). The reason I was hoping to avoid that was that no
distribution ever carried thunderbird-bidiui, and so I was hoping to
avoid the clutter.


After more than a week went by without response, I simply went ahead and
uploaded bidiui-0.7.3-2, which creates a binary package "icedove-bidiui".


A couple of days ago, bidiui was added to the overrides file.
Unfortunately, this uploaded to Sid both "thunderbird-bidiui-0.7.3-1"
AND "icedove-bidiui-0.7.3-2".


As far as I can see, there are three things we can now do:

1. Do nothing. Only icedove-bidiui-0.7.3-2 will get migrated to Etch, as
it is the one built from the source package. Only ask for
"thunberbird-bidiui" to be removed from the archive.

2. Upload a new version that is marked as "conflicts: thunderbird-bidiui".

3. Create an empty migration package for thunderbird-bidiui.


I'm leaning toward doing a unification of 1 and 2. I would really like
to avoid cluttering the archive with yet another transition package that
transition from a package that was only ever a member of the archive for
just a little while.


Comments and flames welcome.


Shachar

P.s.

At least comments welcome.