Call for help with fixing Xiph packages in Debian

[Martin Steghöfer]

El 20/10/14 a les 09:08, Petter Reinholdtsen ha escrit:
>> One important task is to update libvorbis to the recent upstream
>> version. I've imported the old bzr repo into a new git repo,
>> imported all the NMUs into it and I'm looking into packaging
>> libvorbis 1.3.4.
> Yes.  And the question is how brave should we be, 15 days before the
> archive freeze?  Should we update to new upstream versions in
> unstable, or only in experimental until after the freeze?  I suspect
> that need to be decided after evaluating the changes in every package.
> Adding new code to unstable this late run the risk of breaking other
> programs and no-one noticing until it is too late to fix it.  I guess
> that risk need to be compared to the believed advantage of upgrading.
> Having recent packages make it easier to share any future security
> fixes with the rest of the world, and get security fixes from the rest
> of the world.

The changes in the new libvorbis 1.3.4 (compared to 1.3.2; 1.3.3 was 
skipped in Debian) don't scare me a lot:

https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-xiph/libvorbis.git/commit/?h=upstream&id=37c68547f31da4590a31baa0e17c00f20523a9b9

Most line changes are due to them having executed "autoreconf -i", which 
doesn't affect our package at all because we're executing dh_autoreconf 
anyway. And a lot of the changes are about documentation.

The changelog for 1.3.3 talks about some bug fixes and documentation 
changes, for 1.3.4 they didn't even bother to include one (maybe because 
of the very few changes? or they just forgot...). The news on their 
website talks about "reduced static data size in libvorbisenc" and 
"minor fixes":

https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-xiph/libvorbis.git/diff/CHANGES?h=upstream&id=37c68547f31da4590a31baa0e17c00f20523a9b9
http://www.xiph.org/press/2014/libvorbis-1.3.4/

I've rebased our patches onto 1.3.4, built the package and have it 
installed in my production system now to see possible problems as soon 
as possible.

BUT: Given that there hasn't been any knowledge transfer at all from the 
old maintainers to us, I'm not really up for being brave. We don't know 
anything at all about possible pitfalls, it's the first time we touch 
this package. And it has got lots of other packages depending on it.

Cheers,
Martin