Bug#630787: can not update/install morituri because of a syntaxerror

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On 11-08-08 at 09:38am, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> On Mo, Aug 08, 2011 at 09:19:52 (CEST), Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> 
> > Am 07.08.2011 13:08, schrieb Jonas Smedegaard:
> >> I therefore see no reason to elevate this particular to be a 
> >> general issue for Debian.
> >
> > I do. Are you fine with escalating this issue on -devel?
> 
> Does your proposed change to debian/pycompat fix it? If yes, just 
> apply the change and let's be done with it.

What was proposed to declare in debian/pycompat (or debian/control) is 
information about ancient packages not shipped with Debian since 
oldstable.

Therefore the issue is principal: is it a bug in Debian when things 
alien to Debian is installed on the system, or is it a sysadmin issue?


We do not solve this issue by educating Debian packages more widely 
about weird possible combinations of packages: Debian support upgrades 
one stable release at a time - Debian do *not* support keeping around 
old packages!

We do our users a dissservice by including workarounds to deal with 
packages not (any longer) part of Debian.


Problem happened due to the user(s) keeping around a too old version of 
Python through multiple upgrades.  The proper "fix" is - as I tried 
clarify early on in this bugreport - to purge those packages no longer 
part of Debian since ages.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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