[Filesystems-devel] Bug#970176: aka new upstream release

[Theodore Y. Ts'o]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 12:24:51AM +0100, Diederik de Haas wrote:
> Package: f2fs-tools
> Version: 1.11.0-1.1
> Followup-For: Bug #970176
> 
> On salsa.d.o it looks like version 1.13 was ready to go, but it appears
> that it just never got uploaded to the archives/sid.
> It would be really welcome to have a more recent version of f2fs-tools
> in Bullseye and as 1.14 has been released/tagged upstream, it would be
> great to have that one. (But 1.13 would be an improvement as well)
> 
> The freeze is only a couple of months away...

Unfortunately, it can take **months** for the package to go throw the
NEW queue, since f2fs-tools is constantly making ABI-breaking changes
so we have to bump the shared library, causing it to have to go
through ftp-masters.

As such, the super-long latency is super-demotivating, so I've not
just bothered in a while.

I suspect what we should do is drop the shared libraries all together,
and just ship statically linked executables since the f2fs upstream is
constitutionally incapable of keeping shared library ABI's stable.

So it's on my todo list, but that's probably what needs to happen so
we can actually get something posted to sid without being stalled for
months and months in the NEW queue.

I'll try to get it at some point, but if someone else wants to work on
making the necessary changes to the package, help is welcome.  Things
are just a bit busy at the moment, and I've only been working on f2fs
for gce/kvm-xfstests, and testing f2fs hasn't been high on my priority
list.  If someone else wants to be a co-maintainer, that would be
great, since I was only stepping up because no one *else* was updating
f2fs-tools and f2fs-tools was super-out-of-date when I first uploaded
an f2fs-tools updates.

Cheers,

					- Ted