Re: epoch bump for babl and gegl libraries

On Mon, Aug 17, 2020 at 10:21:37AM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
> The GNOME team intend to add an epoch to the babl and gegl libraries,
…
> Historically, versions of these packages were shipped by the third-party
> deb-multimedia.org apt repository. That would have been fine, except that
> the maintainer(s) of deb-multimedia.org added an epoch to their versions.
> It is not clear to me why this was done, and it breaks the versioned
> dependency system, manifesting as frequent bug reports for gimp crashing
> on startup.

Question: what about changing the package name instead, and doing a
transition to a new library package name?  It would be perfect to catch
the occasion of a soname bump, but even then, we are only talking about
less than 10 packages to rebuild for a changed library package name.

> In principle we could add the epoch to only the binary packages,
> but it'll be a lot simpler and less confusing to add it to the source
> package's version. Some of the binary package names (particularly
> libbabl-dev and libgegl-dev) are going to be long-lived, so restricting
> the epoch bump to binary packages would not help us to eliminate the
> epoch in a future Debian release.

This wouldn't solve the problem of the -dev packages having the epoch in
the 3rd party repository, but since you mention that they already
removed the package altogether, I think this is fine: your average user
wouldn't have installed these binaries but only the shared library
binaries, and anybody dealing with building debian packages ought to
keep their system usable enough for that porpuse.  Over time, people who
even had those packages installed would notice somehow… or just
disappear by system reinstallation and whatnot.

> please do not interpret this as precedent for
> having Debian packages reflect epochs added in third-party repositories
> in general.

It's still not so nice though...

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
More about me:  https://mapreri.org                             : :'  :
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