[Pkg-virtualbox-devel] xerces transition

[Jay Berkenbilt]

To all maintainers of packages that have dependencies on libxerces27
or libxerces28:

If you do not have a build dependency on libxerces27-dev or
libxerces28-dev, then please disregard this false positive.
Otherwise, read on.

I have begun a transition to a new organization for the xerces
packages.  I hope that this will make future xerces transitions much
easier.  In particular, there will no longer be more than one minor
version of any major version of xerces in the distribution at a time,
and the -dev packages will be named without the soname of the library
for source-compatible releases.  This is a change I have made with
input and validation from upstream, and it makes xerces more
consistent with many of the other development packages.

The xerces27 and xerecs28 packages will be disappearing.  They have
been replaced by a new source package, xerces-c2.  If you have a build
dependency on either libxerces27-dev or libxerces28-dev, you should
change your build dependency to be on libxerces-c2-dev instead.  The
xerces-c2 package is just a rename of xerces28.  xerces 2.8.0, which
has been out for some time, is fully source-compatible with xerces
2.7.0, so you should have no trouble upgrading if you currently depend
on xerces27.

I have also uploaded xerces-c 3.0.0.b1 to experimental.  This release
is not fully source-compatible with previous releases, so hopefully
your upstreams will create new versions of your packages that work
with 3.x.  When they do, you should switch your build dependency to
libxerces-c-dev, which will always be the -dev package for the latest
release of xerces.  If you'd like to do some preliminary testing to
see if your package works with 3.0.0, you can grab the package from
experimental now.  Keep in mind that this is a beta release from
upstream.

Once xerces-c2, which just cleared NEW today, has built on most of the
architectures, I will be uploading a new dummy transitional xerces28
package to help with upgrades.  I will also soon be requesting removal
of xerces27.

Once xerces-c2 has transitioned to testing along with all the things
that depend on it, I'll wait a short time and then request the removal
of xerces28 as well.

It is my full expectation that xerces-c2 will be stable well before
the release of lenny since this is just a rename.  There should be
plenty of time to complete this relatively small and easy transition.
I have no idea whether xerces-c 3.0.0 will be released in time for
lenny or not.  It is my hope that lenny will have xerces-c2 and
xerces-c in it, but it will at least have xerces-c2 in it.  I do not
expect lenny to contain xerces27 or xerces28.  If xerces-c 3.0.0
stabilizes too close to the scheduled release of lenny, I will not be
suggesting that any packages be transitioned from xerces-c2 to
xerces-c.

Hopefully this note gives you time to handle your packages.  I'll wait
a while, and then I'll post bugs to all packages that have not
transitioned.  Thanks!

-- 
Jay Berkenbilt <qjb at debian.org>
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