Bug#507189: asterisk: Depends on libc-client2007b which is not in unstable

[Adeodato Simó]

Hello, let's see what we have here. I'll start with some theory and
rationales.

First of all, during a freeze maintainers are free to upload to unstable
packages that are not targeted for the next release. We simply ask them
not to do that, because it prevents our ability to fix RC bugs in those
packages via unstable, which is the preferred way.

However, there are packages that, if updated, remove the ability of
other packages to migrate regularly. I think it's reasonable to really
frown upon such uploads, because it throws by the window the efforts of
other maintainers to have their packages cleared for updates via
unstable.

So, because of this, library uploads to unstable during freezes should
be done with a lot of care, and nothing which is not targetted to
$next_stable should be uploaded. A SONAME bump is simply not acceptable.

Regarding the libc-client bump in particular, not only it's not
acceptable at this time in the freeze (*), it was also completely
gratuitous. If, as you say, the dynamic library is not provided by
upstream, and the SONAME is created by the Debian maintainer, then it
has to be maintained in a proper way and only bumped when strictly
necessary. Which was not the case in this upload, at all.

  (*) In your mail you say this bump is not intended for lenny, but we
  already have pacakges blocked because of it (eg., php5). So even if
  you don't intend it for lenny, if does affect lenny.

So, as for what to do, please do stop for squeeze bumping the SONAME
(and changing the package name) on every new upstream version, and only
do it whenever the ABI changes. It would be realy nice if you could do
this. (There is also no reason to rename the -dev package, though since
you provide a virtual package, it's not so grave.)

As for Lenny, the SONAME bump has to be somehow reverted, because we're
not doing a transition at this stage. Since there are no versioned
dependencies on libc-client2007b, it is possible to make
libc-client2007d Provide: libc-client2007b. This is the easiest way
forward, though it requires that we migrate the package to testing. But
we want that anyway, since we want the security fixes in lenny. There
are of course all the packaging changes, but well, let's waive that.

Can you prepare an upload doing that (add the Provides field)? Hopefully
I got all things right, and it will work.

Finally, regarding alpine, is there any mail record of your discussion
with the maintainer. Both the release team and the security team are
very unhappy about code duplication, so unless there's an excellent
reason to do it, we'll chip in and put on some weight on the request.

And that was all. As a summary: upload with provides, introduce sane
soname handling for squeeze, and put us in the loop of the alpine issue.

> I _do_ want to cooperate. :-)

Good. :-)

-- 
Adeodato Simó                                     dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer                                  adeodato at debian.org
 
                       Listening to: Dar Williams - Iowa (Traveling III)