Bug#630787: can not update/install morituri because of a syntaxerror

[Fabian Greffrath]

Am 11.08.2011 19:12, schrieb Jonas Smedegaard:
> My god, how can one be so ignorant and disrespectful as to not listen to
> the arguments put forward (or ask if those are not understood).

Talking about arguments, I have two arguments in the form of users 
that have reported real issues with the morituri package.

Your first argument was to blame the user for not using aptitude for 
upgrades. This turned out as bullshit, because even aptitude does not 
remove packages that still satisfy dependencies. And since the 
morituri package currently only depends on unversioned python, this 
dependency is even satisfied by python2.3, so why remove it.

The second user did use aptitude for his upgrade but obviously still 
faced the same issue. Then you told this user about some alleged 
policy that requires to remove old packages that are not part of the 
distribution anymore on upgrades. As a matter of fact, this policy 
does not exist. Nothing requires me to remove python2.3 on upgrades if 
it is not maintained in Debian anymore. I can keep python2.3 as long 
as I want, nothing forbids this.

So what should lead to a removal of python2.3 on upgrades if not 
package dependencies? It is packages like morituri with imprecise 
dependencies that break upgrades for our users. You say that "It is 
beneficial to Debian to keep package dependencies as simple as 
possible." Generally I agree, but I'd also say it is even more 
benefical to try as hard as possible not to break things - even 
possibly unsupported corner cases.

All it took me to fix this issue was a bit of investigation [1] and 
changing six (!) bytes in the Debian packaging. If you cannot live 
with others applying such tiny changes to your pet packages, you 
shouldn't have them team-maintained!

  - Fabian


[1] For example in the Debian Python Policy, which BTW states:
"The keyword "all" means that the package supports any Python version 
available but might be deprecated in the future since using version 
numbers is clearer than "all" and encodes more information."
<http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/python-policy/ch-module_packages.html>