[pkg-xtuple-maintainers] GCC5 transition and jessie-backports

[Santiago Vila]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 02:19:03PM +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> I started looking at updating the packages postbooks, openrpt and csvimp
> to the latest upstream versions.  My intention, as with previous
> updates, is to put the latest upstream releases into unstable, wait for
> them to propagate to testing and then upload them to backports.
> 
> As part of the GCC5 update[1], one of the binary packages built from
> openrpt has been renamed from libopenrpt1 to libopenrpt1v5 - see bug
> #791230[2] - and that is the version that will be in testing.
> 
> If I understand the rules for backports correctly, backports is supposed
> to contain the same thing that is in testing.

Yes, the "same thing" in the sense of "same functionality", but there
is also a rule, which right now I'm not sure if it's explicit or
implicit, saying backports should try to use dependencies from stable
as much as we can, i.e. avoid extra dependencies if possible.

> Given that unstable and testing will use GCC5 and jessie-backports
> should be using the GCC 4.9 from jessie, what is supposed to happen?
> Will GCC5 be available to compile for backports and should such packages
> declare a dependency on the newer libstdc++?

Most probably not. The new C++ libraries usually break and replace the
old ones. If we change the names in jessie-backports, packages in
jessie using the old libraries would have to be removed when
installing packages in jessie-backports using the "same" libraries.

That would probably result in a complete mess if we want to keep
jessie being stable.

> Or is it permitted to make uploads to jessie-backports without the
> "v5" suffix, so the package name in backports won't be the same as
> the package name in testing?

More than "permitted", I would consider that to be the normal thing to do,
i.e. when backporting a C++ package for jessie, keep the old library names
in jessie.