[Python-modules-team] Bug#762186: python-pypdf: Unexpectedly breaks existing programs on update

[Vincent Cheng]

Dear maintainer,

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 22:42:50 +0200 Elena Grandi
<valhalla-d at trueelena.org> wrote:
> Package: python-pypdf
> Version: 1.23-1
> Severity: grave
> Justification: renders package unusable
>
> Dear Maintainer,
>
> updating python-pypdf from 1.13 to 1.23 breaks every existing script
> that use this module with an ImportError: No module named pyPdf.
>
> Changing pyPdf to PyPDF2 everywhere in the scripts allows to use
> the new version, but in the update there was no hint that this
> change was needed.
>
> Expecially if this happens during an update between stable versions
> this will break existing deployments of custom programs, causing
> lots of pain.

Worse still is the fact that currently in sid, both src:python-pypdf
and src:pypdf2 build binary package python-pypdf. One of the above
source packages must stop building python-pypdf, and since pypdf2 is
the one that's breaking reverse dependencies, I would very much
appreciate it this is initially done in src:pypdf2.

The next time you package a fork as a new source package, please don't
immediately hijack the other package's namespace, and give a heads up
to maintainers of your library's reverse deps so that they have time
to react. It'd be really nice if you could also coordinate an informal
transition and offer patches/NMUs to fix up pypdf's reverse
dependencies.

Regards,
Vincent