Bug#969907: inkscape, etc. crashing with mismatched libpoppler102 and libpoppler-glib8

[Ivo De Decker]

Hi,

On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 06:53:55PM +0200, Mattia Rizzolo wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 11, 2021 at 08:02:20PM +0200, Ivo De Decker wrote:
> > There is a theoretical and a practical aspect to this issue. From a
> > theoretical point of view, the dependency relations should not be stricter
> > than necessary, to allow partial upgrades and to avoid complicating
> > migration to testing of library transitions.
> 
> Then again, I believe the project at large is moving towards
> stricter-than-necessary dependencies (see the implied dh_makeshlibs -V
> in dh compat 12, lintian nagging about the Build-Depends-Package in
> .symbols files, etc).

We'll need to find a middle ground here. The impact will depends on the way
the issue is fixed. I guess that's something for bookworm.

The main concerns (from my POV) are:
- making sure we don't inadvertently create some dependency loop that makes
  upgrades more difficult (or impossible)
- avoiding turning the library transition into a non-smooth one, where all
  packages have to migrate at the same time

> I also don't believe a stricter dependency between libpoppler102 and
> libpoppler-glib8 would have any of the issue you mention.

I suspect tightening the dependencies between libpoppler-glibX and libpopplerX
will cause a lot less issues than artificially bumping the version for all
symbols.

> > It would create the desired dependency, but I'm not sure if this is better
> > than just manually adding it to the 2 remaining packages we are aware of
> > (especially at this stage of the freeze).
> 
> > For now, though (and especially for bullseye), I think we should accept
> > that we aren't going to solve this issue in general. The best we can do, is
> > to try to fix obvious cases where we are aware of the issue. In other cases,
> > we'll probably need to advise our users to do a full upgrade instead of a
> > partial one.
> 
> So, if that's what you think, should I upload an inkscape with a manual
> dependency on libpoppler-glib8 >= 20.09.0?

Yes, that would be useful.

> (mhh, is there a way to do this without writing it in d/control?).

There probably is, but writing it in d/control will be the easiest by far.

Thanks,

Ivo