[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#800481: dcmtk: versioned -dev package makes transitions too painful

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

On 02/10/15 14:02, Mathieu Malaterre wrote:
>> Your -dev package went from libdcmtk2-dev to libdcmtk4-dev. That makes
>> transitions too painful as every reverse dependency needs a sourceful upload to
>> change the build dependency, instead of the release team just scheduling binNMUs
>> as is normally done.
> 
> Here is how this is done:
> 
> [...]
> Package: libdcmtk2-dev
> Section: libdevel
> Architecture: any
> Depends: libdcmtk2v5 (= ${binary:Version}), ${misc:Depends}, ${shlibs:Depends}
> Conflicts: libdcmtk1-dev
> Replaces: libdcmtk1-dev
> Provides: libdcmtk-dev
> [...]
> 
> So if third party libs requires explicit `libdcmtk2-dev`, then the
> issue is within there own package. AFAIK there is nothing wrong with
> this scheme.

What's wrong is that you're making everybody b-depend on libdcmtk2-dev because
that's the package name - even if people could b-d on libdcmtk-dev, because
maintainers probably don't even know your package provides the non-versioned
package name.

So if you really want to follow this approach, better do it the other way round.
I.e make the package libdcmtk-dev and Provide libdcmtkN-dev.

It's just useless and more work for everyone to be renaming the -dev package
because they are not going to co-exist as long as you don't rename the src
package as well.

Cheers,
Emilio