[php-maint] Backport requirements exception for some packages (php5)

[Ondřej Surý]

Hi Alexander,

On Mon, Dec 16, 2013, at 14:14, Alexander Wirt wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Dec 2013, Ondřej Surý wrote:
> 
> > Hi Alexander,
> > 
> > On Mon, Dec 16, 2013, at 13:42, Alexander Wirt wrote:
> > > At the moment, I don't think we will accept it. Providing PHP in backports
> > > was always troublesome, as a lot of applications just stop to work with
> > > newer versions.
> > 
> > Care to provide the evidence? AFAIK we never had a PHP in backports. I
> > would agree with you it this request came from some third party, but
> > here you have PHP packages provided and supported by the PHP Debian
> > team.
> php5.5 will make several php based applications incompatible to the php
> in bpo, wont't it?

We are not going to backport php5 5.5.x, just php4 5.4.x.

> > > And especially in that case it is a problem. If we want to keep
> > > with the 5.4.x upload currently sitting in NEW we will end with an
> > > unsupported branch (testing already has 5.5.x), which is imho not
> > > acceptable.
> > 
> > Why? The upstream release process aims to keep the compatibility in the
> > 5.4.x branch and the Debian packagers are willing to support the 5.4.x
> > branch in the backports. Also the external services (dotdeb.org for
> > Debian, my PPAs for Ubuntu) proves that people are hungry to have latest
> > PHP running and I don't really see a reason why we can't provide that
> > from within the Debian infrastructure.
> And? backports come from testing. And you plan to support php5.4.x from
> testing for all the time?

That rule comes from the fact that we need straight upgrade path, right?

So this is not going to be a problem since jessie will have php5 >=
5.5.0 and
wheezy-backports will always have php5 << 5.5.0, e.g. 5.4.x.

The whole motivation comes from the fact that people want new stable PHP
versions, but we don't want to go the python way (we don't have enough
manpower and we also like our sanity), so this is the best compromise we
could get.

We have started to update stable versions with non-security bugs since
wheezy and it was much appreciated, but we are unable to cherry-pick
everything, so the scenarios where:

wheezy-updates has 5.4.4 with security and serious patches
wheezy-backports has 5.4.latest
jessies/testing/unstable has 5.5.latest

is the most sane and most beneficial way how to support PHP in Debian
while not breaking anything.

Ondrej
-- 
Ondřej Surý <ondrej at sury.org>
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