[Python-modules-team] Bug#762186: Bug#762186: python-pypdf: Unexpectedly breaks existing programs on update

[Vincent Cheng]

On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 2:54 AM, Vincent Cheng <vcheng at debian.org> wrote:
> Dear maintainer,
>
> On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 22:42:50 +0200 Elena Grandi
> <valhalla-d at trueelena.org> wrote:
>> Package: python-pypdf
>> Version: 1.23-1
>> Severity: grave
>> Justification: renders package unusable
>>
>> Dear Maintainer,
>>
>> updating python-pypdf from 1.13 to 1.23 breaks every existing script
>> that use this module with an ImportError: No module named pyPdf.
>>
>> Changing pyPdf to PyPDF2 everywhere in the scripts allows to use
>> the new version, but in the update there was no hint that this
>> change was needed.
>>
>> Expecially if this happens during an update between stable versions
>> this will break existing deployments of custom programs, causing
>> lots of pain.
>
> Worse still is the fact that currently in sid, both src:python-pypdf
> and src:pypdf2 build binary package python-pypdf. One of the above
> source packages must stop building python-pypdf, and since pypdf2 is
> the one that's breaking reverse dependencies, I would very much
> appreciate it this is initially done in src:pypdf2.
>
> The next time you package a fork as a new source package, please don't
> immediately hijack the other package's namespace, and give a heads up
> to maintainers of your library's reverse deps so that they have time
> to react. It'd be really nice if you could also coordinate an informal
> transition and offer patches/NMUs to fix up pypdf's reverse
> dependencies.
>

Looks like the BTS is a bit confused over who the maintainer for
src:pypdf2 is, so forwarding this directly to its maintainer.

Regards,
Vincent