[Debian GNUstep maintainers] GDL2 Release for Debian Lenny

Yavor Doganov yavor at gnu.org
Fri Jun 6 20:15:15 UTC 2008


Hubert Chathi wrote:
> 
> Perhaps we should take a quick poll.

This is an excellent idea, but how do you expect to do it?  The lists
this discussion is being carried on have limited audience.  Of course
the opinion of the gnustep-dev subscribers is valuable, and that of
the main GNUstep maintainers and contributors matters even more.

> Theoretically, upgrading to the latest unstable GNUstep libraries would
> also allow us to update etoile, but I don't know if anyone has time to
> update the packaging soon enough.

Personally, I'm ashamed that etoile in Debian is in such a pathetic
state.  I've been working on 0.2 packaging for some time, but it has
also some bugs and annoyances and is generally unsupported upstream.
I think that whatever happens, it is not realistic to bring etoile
into shape for Lenny.  This package is a huge undertaking, and not
trivial even for a skilled Debian maintainer.

We should definitely update it in the early Lenny+1 cycle, though.

> I should add that if we want to upgrade to a newer version of the
> GNUstep libraries, this could still be vetoed by the Debian Release
> Managers, if they don't think that we would hold up the release.

Exactly.  The GNUstep stack has always been a problem for the release
team, and the last transition (I'm not blaming GNUstep developers at
all) was the most painful in the history.  We had to patch/modify
literally every package, and this was combined with some bugs exposed
by the new dpkg-shlibdeps behavior and other toolchain/infrastructure
improvements in Debian that revealed a lot of bugs.

> [1] IIRC, we would lose ProjectCenter because the old version
> doesn't build with gnustep-make 2.0, and has incorrect templates for
> gnustep-make 2.0,

Yes, that's right.  We can theoretically make the last stable PC
version RC-bug free and thus in release state Debian-wise but I would
not do that in clear conscience.  It would be utterly useless for
everyone.

> Yes, the powerpc one smells like the old build failure that hit
> gnustep-examples, so I wonder if the same "fix" would work, 

Ah, right.  It's exactly the same.  Even more so, the author of the
code is exactly the same -- so Nicola, could you please take a look at
this?  The user should be able to compile the package with no
optimization for testing/debugging purposes (or whatever).  The "fix"
applied in Debian is just a workaround, IMO.

References:
http://buildd.debian.org/fetch.cgi?pkg=renaissance&arch=powerpc&ver=0.9.0-1&stamp=1208914375&file=log&as=raw
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=457555



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