Bug#599523: Ping - unexpected downgrades

[Axel Beckert]

Hi Julian,

Julian Andres Klode wrote:
> (replying to Axel)

Thanks for the reply. It helps a lot to understand what's going on and
why the version numbers look so uncommon.

> It was more or less common code, and it was then modularized and cleaned up
> during GSoC to be directly useable in both distributions. The changes were
> uploaded to Debian. Ubuntu, relying more heavily on update-manager, never
> merged in those changes, and continued the old code base.

:-(

> > > So maybe orphaning or even removal from testing is the better solution
> > > than just RFA'ing the package.
> > > 
> > > It only seems to have one hard reverse dependency (and a few Suggests
> > > and one second-level Recommends) in Testing currently, i.e. removing
> > > it from testing and hence wheezy shouldn't be too complicated with
> > > regards to reverse dependencies:
> > > 
> > >   update-notifier depends on update-manager-gnome
> > > 
> > > But OTOH 26% popcon installations and 10% votes rather oppose a
> > > removal quite strongly.
> 
> It was part of the default installation together with other stuff
> from Ubuntu, but we now use (GNOME) PackageKit instead.

Oh, ok.

> We can
>  (a) upload a compat package which switches the user to PackageKit
>      and includes a script to call gnome-packagekit's update manager. 
> 
>  (b) upload a new update-notifier package that moves the user to
>      GNOME PackageKit, and remove update-manager from the archive
>      (or at least testing).
> 
>  (c) upload a new update-notifier package that simply removes the 
>      dependency, and disables the actions.
> 
> I think that (a) or (b) are good options.

On a first glance my (very personal) preference is (c) because
update-notifier is the only reason why I have update-manager installed
at all. If it would start pulling in PackageKit, I'll very likely
remove update-notifier from my system.

But I do see that pulling in GNOME PackageKit does make sense, so
after some thinking my favourite option would be (b) with just
Recommends to GNOME PackageKit and disabled or reduced actions if the
Recommends is not fulfilled.

Nevertheless, I'd say that all these three options are rather relevant
for Jessie than for Wheezy.

With regards to this bug (#599523), I guess it's not trivial to fix,
otherwise it would have been fixed already earlier. So if
update-manager won't be included in Jessie anyway, this bug possibly
may be a candidate for the wheezy-ignore tag -- it already
has the squeeze-ignore tag because it doesn't seem to occur in pure
stable environments.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
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