[Debian-med-packaging] New version of aevol available

[Andreas Tille]

Hi David,

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 05:08:19PM +0200, David Parsons wrote:
> Hi Andreas,
> 
> I am indeed aware of the new version of aevol (4.3).
> However, in this version, a few executables were moved from the
> libexec directory to the bin directory. Since no manpages have been
> written for these yet, lintian issues a bunch of
> binary-without-manpage warnings

Well, lintian *warnings* are no real reasons to delay a package in case
you as upstream consider the new version helpful for your users.

> that will disappear in version 4.4,
> which should be released in the next few weeks.

If I would be aware that the lintian warnings are a temporary issue I
would not mind a lot.

> If you think this is not an issue, I can push the modifications to
> the SVN right now.

I would decide what might be in the best interest of our users and I
think you as upstream are best qualified to draw this decision.  Hiding
new better code because some manpages which are possible not really
noticed by your users does not sound like a sensible strategy just
because lintian is warning about it.
 
> BTW, I've been using Depends: ${shlibs:Depends}, ${misc:Depends} for
> the aevol package. This creates dependencies to recent versions of
> some packages (e.g. dep: libc6
> <https://packages.debian.org/fr/sid/libc6> (>= 2.15) where current
> stable version of libc6 is 2.13). This means that we rely on the
> user adding the "testing" or "unstable" repositories to their
> /etc/apt/sources.list file, which feels wrong.

No.  This is the way it works.  You definitely should use
${shlibs:Depends}.  If you want to support users of stable you need
to care for uploading to backports.debian.org.

> Because of that, I'm considering setting dependencies manually. Is
> this a bad idea ?

Yes, this is definitely a bad idea.

> Also, could you give me some input about how/when a package goes
> from testing to stable ?

If a new Debian version is released.  The Freeze for Jessie is announced
for 2014-11-05 and than it depends how long it might take to fix all
release critical bugs.  There is no other way from testing to stable
except if there might be some serious security issues.  As I said:
There is backports to support users of stable but until now we have not
provided any backports in the Debian Med team.  There might be another
option to use a PPA which you could discuss on the Debian Med mailing
list.  I personally did never used this.

Kind regards

      Andreas.

-- 
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