annoucement of important debian libtiff changes

[Jay Berkenbilt]

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This message is being sent in bulk to the maintainer and pts address
for every package that depends upon libtiff3g or libtiff3g-dev.
Please accept my apologies if you receive this message more than once.

Executive summary: all packages that depend upon libtiff3g or
libtiff3g-dev must be recompiled with libtiff4 or libtiff4-dev as a
precondition for being included in sarge.  No source changes are
required; updating dependencies and rebuilding should be sufficient.
Please use urgency=medium on the new uploads.

FTBFS bugs with severity serious will be posted to all packages that
depend upon libtiff3g or libtiff3g-dev a few days after the upload of
the new tiff packages.

- ---

An accidental ABI change was made in libtiff (upstream) between
version 3.5.7 (the version currently in sarge) and 3.6.1 (the version
currently in sid).  This has resulted in 10 merged release-critical
bugs filed against libtiff3g for packages that don't work correctly
when compiled with one of these versions and run with the other.

Unfortunately, since this problem has been left unresolved for some
time, many packages have been compiled with 3.6.1 in sid and have
transitioned into sarge where they may not work correctly with 3.5.7.
Some of these packages are known to work correctly in sid but not in
sarge.  Transitioning version 3.6.1 of libtiff into sarge is
unaccaptable because it would create incompatbility with woody and
third-party applications that were compiled with libtiff 3.5.7 or
earlier.

To ensure that this problem is fully corrected, sarge will not contain
a libtiff.so.3.  Version 3.6.1 of libtiff will be included as
libtiff.so.4, with support of upstream.  All packages that depend upon
libtiff3g or libtiff3g-dev will have to be rebuilt with libtiff4 or
libtiff4-dev.  Doing this update is a precondition for the package
being included in sarge.  Please note that there were no source-level
interface changes between 3.5.7 and 3.6.1, so it should be sufficient
to just update the dependencies and recompile.  Use urgency=medium
when making this change.

It will be important for these changes to be made quickly as, once the
new tiff packages are uploaded, many packages will no longer be
installable or buildable from source.  As such, release-critical bugs
(severity serous, justification FTBFS) will be filed against any
package that still depends upon libtiff3g or libtiff3g-dev a few days
after the upload of the new tiff packages, and any packages that have
not been fixed and uploaded within approximately one week will be
NMUed.  Once all packages that depend upon libtiff have appeared in
sid, all these packages will be able to transition into sarge
together.

For additional background information on this solution, please see

<http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2004/07/msg00071.html>

and its associated thread.  For more information on the problem
itself, please see

<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=236247>

- -- 
Jay Berkenbilt <ejb@ql.org>
http://www.ql.org/q/
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