Fwd: Request to backport igtf-policy-bundle

[Nicholas D Steeves]

Dear Philippe,

CCing Pulseaudio maintenance team.  Dear team, would you please skip to
the bottom for my question to you?

phil995511 - <phil995511 at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Please make available bluez version 5.52-1 and dependencies from
> experimental to Debian 10 Buster Backports :
>
> https://packages.debian.org/experimental/bluez
>

Unfortunately this is not yet an option, because "Backports tracks
testing and only package versions included in testing are allowed in
backports, subject to a few expedient exceptions"; As far as I know,
those exceptions are exclusively for security fixes.

Unofficial personal backports are of course not subject to this
restriction.

If 5.52 breaks ABI with 5.50 (which it presumably does) then bluez-using
applications/libraries will need to be recompiled.  This would block an
official backport (eg: this is why a newer version of Qt can't be in
backports, nor any new releases of applications that require that new
version, eg: Calibre)

> the current version 5.50-1.2~deb10u1 are bugged :
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=963170
>

Filing this bug was the right approach, because before a backport of the
5.52 release becomes an option it must be in testing, thus in sid.

> This makes my equipment unusable ;-( I would love to be able to reuse
> Debian 10 on my machine... I prefer it so much to Ubuntu !!
>

:-) For what it's worth, one of the reasons I also prefer Debian is I've
found it's more robust when adding backports.

There's another sense of "backport" by the way.  So far we've been
discussing backporting the whole package, but in your subject line
you've requested a "backport [of the] igtf-policy-bundle", which is a
different kind of "backport".  In the case of the subject line of this
email, you're requesting that igtf-policy-bundle be backported from 5.52
to 5.50.  The Debian-backports list is about backporting whole packages,
and #963170 is ambiguous about what it's asking for.

eg: Are you requesting a hardware-enablement backport of
"igtf-policy-bundle" to the package in Buster, or are you requesting an
upload of 5.52 to sid/unstable?  These are two different issues, and I
think the bug should be cloned and the intent of each copy disambiguated.

A third option to get your Sony headphones working on Debian stable is
to buy a usb-audio device that has a bt radio and codecs; these show up
as an audio device and not a bluetooth adapter.  IIRC this is the only
way to use the new advanced proprietary codecs like AptX, and if you
value sound quality then this is the recommended approach.

I took a look at Arch's package which appears to support AptX via
libldac ( https://github.com/EHfive/ldacBT ), and Apache 2.0 licensed
library.  Is there any reason our pulseaudio-module-bluetooth can't
enable this functionality?

Best,
Nicholas
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