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

[Damyan Ivanov]

-=| Rene Engelhard, 07.10.2016 14:53:22 +0200 |=-
> 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).

I see.

> > 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.

The idea is to have everything in one or two packages, isolated 
somewhere under /usr/lib/libfbembed2.5 and LO build-depending on 
libfbembed2.5-dev, but...

> > to have a backup plan.
> 
> As said, I could either use the internal copy or simply disable it ;-)

... the more I think about keeping libfbembed2.5 for stretch, the more 
I don't want to do it :) We had releases with two firebird versions 
before, and backporting security fixes was pain. And I am shorter on 
time these days than back then.

So my suggestion is to fall back to either of:

 - disabling firebird support in LO - perhaps bad for users
 - switching to internal copy - more future work backporting security 
   fixes
 - switch to fb3 in LO - incompatibility with upstream/others

Do you want me to file a bug against LO so that this isn't forgotten?


-- Damyan
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