[pkg-firebird-general] Uncoordinated firebird transition (closes: Re: Accepted firebird3.0 3.0.1.32609.ds4-3 (source) into unstable)

[Rene Engelhard]

Hi,

On Fri, Oct 07, 2016 at 12:04:06PM +0000, Damyan Ivanov wrote:
> Sorry about that, I needed to be more public about my plans.

Yeah, that would have been nice. :)

> Thing is, FB2.5's end of life is planned¹ for 2017, which means more 
> or less a full Debian release cycle without upstream support. I am 
> simply not ready to maintain that. Therefore I aimed at dropping 2.5 
> before the release of stretch.

OK, understandable.

> > (And even if it built, one might want to keep whatever upstream uses 
> > for file format compatibility... Maybe I'll use the internal 
> > firebird copy or just disable libreoffice-sdbc-firebird then...)
> 
> File format compatibility will be a problem whenever LO switches from 
> fb2.5 to fb3.0. E.g. an user upgrades (jessie->stretch or 
> stretch->stretch+1) and their databases can't be opened anymore.

I know. (well, feared). The whole firebird stuff is basically experimental
anyway, though, so. My comment above was more aimed at our LO vs. upstream LO
or our LO vs. other distributions' LO (in the same version).

> May be I can keep libfbebmed2.5 (plus dependencies) for stretch, 
> removing only the server/util/fbclient packages. Would that work for 
> libreoffice.org? I'd still prefer to drop 2.5 entirely, but it helps 

The problem is firebird-dev.

> to have a backup plan.

As said, I could either use the internal copy or simply disable it ;-)

> The embedded access that required linking with libfbembed with 2.5 is 
> now possible with 3.0's libfbclient, which can load the appropriate 
> "engine library" and work without a server. So it seems to me that the 
> changes shouldn't be that severe. (But yes, this should have been 
> coordinated to avoid the bad surprise effect).

Yes, that's what LO did for 5.3.

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=e5d48f12faec6027bf79411cb69111d90f4e4129
+
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=de899f0b350e51b1932fa4674f7ce2ae386cd1ce
+
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=45f42681f4d1260c42140a313560534e605f81a4

(some more, but those are the main ones, afaics)

Regards,

Rene