[php-maint] Reboot Apache2 2.4 transition

[Arno Töll]

Hi there,

Now that Wheezy is ehrm virtually released ..., we'd like to reboot the
Apache 2.4 transition process as soon as possible. In other words, we'd
like to break Sid - as far as Apache is involved - in a foreseeable
future. With your permission to proceed as suggested pending, we'd like
to propose this procedure to continue with the Apache 2.4 transition:

*) Aim for an upload of Apache 2.4 in June. The exact date is not fixed
and determined by two factors: You approving the process itself, and the
availability of a 2.4 port for certain reverse dependencies (see next
point).

*) Since this upload is going to break all existing module reverse
dependencies, this causes bad breakage to users of Apache in Sid. We're
aware of that, but it can't be avoided entirely since a transition in
Experimental only does not seem to work out that well, as we're trying
to prod the maintainers of affected packages for over a year.

However, to smoothen the transition as much as possible, we'd like to
wait with an upload to Sid until these reverse dependencies have updated
packages available and then do a coordinated upload with the respective
maintainers (they're all CC:-ed):

- mod_php
- mod_security
- mod_wsgi
- mod_dnssd (gnome-user-share)
- mod_jk
- mod_fcgid
- subversion

This is a somewhat biased choice, based on the popularity of the
modules, and their relative importance in the Apache eco-system itself.
PHP, and WSGI for example have reverse dependencies on their own, which
are affected by our transition, too. Please maintainers of these
package, do help us so that we can do the upload in a timely manner.

Maintainers, if you need help us to transition with these modules, let
the Apache maintainers know. We'll help you.

*) Once the package is uploaded to Unstable together with a reasonably
small subset of reverse dependencies as defined above, we'd like to
successively  increase the amount of transitioned packages to a larger
amount (see the full list in previous posts) before considering a
migration to Testing.

It is up to decide together with you when exactly this is going to
happen, but I do not suspect this being the case until (end of) summer.

At some point we'd like to ask you to remove remaining non-transitioned
packages from Testing so that we migrate the already transitioned
packages, including our own. Until then, we'd file a "testing migration
blocking bug" against our own package, so that it can't migrate to
Testing by accident.

*) Once the package has reached Testing, we'd like to address a
transition of web-applications reverse depending on Apache. This cannot
be parallelized easily, because most of them are depending on some other
third party module, too. On the upside, web applications are somewhat
broken during the migration, but this may only affect the integration of
the Apache web server, whereas the application itself remains functional.

Does this make sense to you?


-- 
with kind regards,
Arno Töll
IRC: daemonkeeper on Freenode/OFTC
GnuPG Key-ID: 0x9D80F36D

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