[Pkg-tcltk-devel] Bug#774890: Is this bug really RC?

[Axel Beckert]

Hi together,

Andreas Tille wrote:
> I stumbled upon this bug since it affects staden maintained by
> Debian Med.

Same here with gnudatalanguage.

> When reading the bug report I stumbled upon
> 
>    The errors seems to date back to the lenny->squeeze update ...

Well, you (Andreas T) did not cite a possible relevant part here:

| This was observed on the following upgrade paths:
|
|   lenny -> squeeze -> wheezy -> jessie

Although this upgrade path is not 100% true for all involved packages.
See below.

> I'm seriously wondering whether this issue is RC critical for Jessie
> release

To be honest: I think this is generally an RC-level issue and should
be fixed.

But I also think, it's a candidate for a jessie-ignore tag as the bug
has been in there for quite a while (obviously) and -- from a first
glance at the log which Andreas B. attached -- has no operational
impact, just legal impact (wrong copyright file, etc.).

Cc'ing debian-release for that.

(This does not mean that I think it can't be fixed for Jessie. I just
think that it's not an urgent issue as it exists for about 5 years
now.)

> since we do not support upgrades over several releases.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean with "upgrades over several releases".
Let me elaborate:

We definitely support sequent dist-upgrades, even if it's not
explicitly mentioned anywhere. Everyone does them. There's no rule
that you need to reinstall after one dist-upgrade and can't do the
next one because it's not supported.

What we don't support is upgrades where releases are skipped, e.g.
upgrades directly from Squeeze to Jessie without first upgrading to
Wheezy -- that's clearly not supported.

So far so good, but the attached log shows a case not covered by
either scenario above: A package (msort-gui) which was not part of the
one release was kept installed for that release: During the squeeze state
of that chroot, the msort-gui package from lenny was still installed
and then upgraded to the Wheezy version with the dist-upgrade to
Wheezy.

So the package which triggered this issue is msort-gui which was not
part of the Squeeze release. But itk3 was. So while this issue showed
up in an unsupported scenario, it still could happen and be an issue
in a supported scenario.

(I initially thought, Andreas B. attached the wrong piuparts log,
because it's not for itk3 but for msort-gui. But msort-gui depends on
itk3 via iwidgets4 and the issue in itk3 indeed shows up in that log.)

> Can you please be more verbose in how far this issue affects the
> Jessie release?

The issue was likely caused by this non-trivial change back in 2009
(3.3-1):

  * New upstream release, moving itk3 to a separate source package.

Lenny had itcl3 and itk3 in version 3.2.1-5 and Squeeze itk3 version
3.3-2.

As far as I understand it, the issue is that on a box which such a
history, the file /usr/share/doc/itcl3/copyright is actually the
copyright file of itk3 which comes from different source package.

This clearly violates the policy and is hence RC.

The issue exists probably since itk3/3.3-1 -- it just hasn't been
found before as it has no operational impact. And piuparts back then
probably didn't do _that_ kind of check.

So this issue will persist until any later package fixes it. I though
wonder how to fix it, since the copyright file of itcl3 already has
been overwritten. May require a Breaks in itcl3, too, so that itk3 is
first upgraded and can fix the issue, and the itcl3 upgrade then fixes
the missing copyright file.

Such a Breaks, which forces itk3 to fix the issue before itcl3 gets
upgraded, likely also fixes the issues Sergei brought up in
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=774890#15 (which has
been posted after I started writing this mail).

One more thing I'm still curious about: How the fuck do you stumble
upon such a bug? :-) I don't expect that Andreas runs piuparts
starting with Lenny on a daily business or without reason. I expect
that a real-life case (which Andreas B. didn't mention) is hidden
behind it and caused him to do that piuparts run.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
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