Bug#912914: gap breaks multiple autopkgtests

[Paul Gevers]

Hi Bill,

On Sun, 4 Nov 2018 22:17:45 +0100 Bill Allombert <ballombe at debian.org>
wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 04, 2018 at 09:57:59PM +0100, Paul Gevers wrote:
> > With a recent upload of gap the autopkgtest of gap-float, gap-guava,
> > gap-io, gap-laguna, gap-openmath, gap-scscp and gap-sonata fail in
> > testing when their autopkgtests are run with the binary packages of gap
> > from unstable. It passes when run with only packages from testing. In
> > tabular form:

Nearly the same is now happening with your upload of gap/4r10p0-3.

> However, I am not the author of this autopkgtest and I do not maintain
> gap-float etc. and I have notified the maintainers in advance of the
> migration to GAP 4r9, so I expect them to deal with this issue, since it
> was expected.

I assume you have informed your reverse dependencies again.

Trying to be helpful... Apparently in the gap ecosystem, packages need
to migrate in lockstep. I am wondering, can't you change the packaging,
such that this is recognized as a (sort of) transition? If you can't
rename the "library" package in a similar way as libraries do in Debian,
you could provide a API virtual package that your reverse dependencies
depend on (potentially embedded during build, than the package has a
chance of only requiring a binNMU; I don't know the gap ecosystem if
that is feasible). Than at least the migration software knows to hold of
the migration until all packages are ready, even without those
autopkgtest failures.

Paul

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