[Pkg-protobuf-devel] Bug#835170: transition: protobuf

[Niels Thykier]

Dmitry Smirnov:
> On Tuesday, 23 August 2016 8:51:23 PM AEST Adam D. Barratt wrote:
>> That's not an excuse for causing disruption in unstable.
> 
> I'm not sure when it is OK to cause disruption in unstable. For example 
> uploading new GCC seems to cause a lot of problems despite attempts to 
> mitigate FTBFS.
> 

GCC transitions are still planned/announced ahead of time (e.g. 5.X ->
6.X) with the release team involved.  That way we can plan which
transitions are running in parallel with e.g. GCC (or other disruptive
transitions).

Secondly, in the particular case for GCC.  There tends to be a lot of
preparation for those.  Notably an archive-wide rebuild and bugs filed
against all packages that FTBFS with the new version.

So while GCC transitions do break more packages on average, they are
also coordinated and well-planned.

> [...]
>> There are other
>> packages that need transitions that I'm sure the maintainers also
>> believe are "crucial".
> 
> Indeed. Yet protobuf-3 is long overdue and we absolutely must have it as its 
> absence caused a lot of disruption on its own...
> 
> Apologies for inconvenience.
> 

That is no excuse for not following the procedure.  If everyone follows
that pattern, unstable will become entirely broken beyond our ability to
keep up and fix it.

These days we have very fast transitions - among other because:

 * People test their packages and reverse dependencies ahead of time
 * They plan the transitions with the release team to avoid smashing
   existing transitions
 * Our tooling has vastly improved since "the dark ages".


Please review https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/ReleaseTeam/Transitions for
the next transition.  Most of the preparation can be done in your own
cadence and you can request the slot in parallel with the final
preparation on your side.

Thanks,
~Niels