Re: deb822 support [.sources for apt] in d-i

Roland Clobus <[email protected]> Sun, 25 May 2025 10:13:40 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.apt.devel
Message-ID	<86785c93-69a6-41ea-bc91-ca37d98b961b__20576.3461229921$1748160875$gmane$org@rclobus.nl>

Hello all,

On 25/05/2025 05:47, Cyril Brulebois wrote:
> Marc Haber <[email protected]> (2025-05-15):
>> Has anybody talked to the apt maintainers whether they would be willing to
>> disable the deprecation warnings for the release, allowing one (more?) cycle
>> where the two formats are equal citizens? The deprecation warnings we had in
>> the last months has stirred us up, the installer is moving now, and the
>> other packages as well¹, so the focus could be shifted to a smooth release
>> now and going back to the nag warnings after the release?
> 
> You forgot the spoiler alerts! (That was my backup plan.)
> 
> 
> After 10 days, I've only heard about Philip Hands (thanks!) with some idea
> about how to approach the transition, and we agreed it's actually really
> not trivial… and of course you, Marc.

Sorry for not replying sooner. After the MiniDebConf in Hamburg I was 
travelling for week and still have not fully caught up with the mail 
backlog.

Going for full dep822 support is definitely worth the effort. Just 
running 'apt-get modernize' at appropriate times might work for suitably 
simple installations, but the devil is in the details (e.g. expert 
installer mode).
Looking at live-build (for which I'm a maintainer), there is quite some 
work to do, and that's not trivial [1].

Having the warning in apt definitely has woken us up. The migration to 
dep822 should be finished soon, but I wouldn't like to delay the release 
of trixie for this. However, bothering all new installations of trixie 
with this warning seems to me to be unfair to the end users.

I would support the proposal to have a version of apt without the 
warning, just for the trixie release. Immediately after trixie is 
released, the warning can be turned on again for forky (or even during a 
specific point release, if that were allowed).

With kind regards,
Roland Clobus

[1] A tiny first step is already in live-build: 
https://salsa.debian.org/live-team/live-build/-/commit/f08dae6074e54c6331871bb8f29aabdbb54d1dc1

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