Hi Marga, (FTR: I'm still lurking around Ruby stuff, even if I'm not doing any work, so that's just me being curious, not planning any actual work :P)
On 04/03/14 at 17:00 +0100, Margarita Manterola wrote: > Upon more thinking on this issue, it occurred to me that the reason why you > might have added the artificial conflict is the removal of the alternatives > system. yes > Personally, I don't see any gain and many losses by removing the alternatives > system. However, I accept that this is your call to make. > > One possibility would be to upload a ruby1.8 package that doesn't have the > alternatives system in it, and have a versioned Conflicts that allows that > package to stay. The problem with this solution is that the intended result > is > that jessie shouldn't have ruby1.8, and so users upgrading from wheezy will > never get such a package. So I don't see this as a real solution. > > As I said in my previous email, it's fine to drop support for ruby1.8 and > remove > all deps and packages from the archive. What is not fine is breaking current > scripts that users might have on their machines, that still depend on ruby1.8, > without a valid technical reason. This has always been the way Debian > operates: > we don't remove packages from users' machines that still work just because we > dropped support for them. > > I don't think that the decision to drop the alternatives system is a good > enough > reason to break side-by-side for ruby1.8 and ruby1.9.1, which has been working > fine for years. Could you share what is your use case for ruby1.8? I agree that one or two years ago, dropping 1.8 would have been a terrible decision. But now I think that most upstreams have made the switch. Also, what you provide about the Debian way is not quite true. For many packages, new versions break old software, and most of the time we don't provide a way for the user to continue to run their old code. What is different in that specific case is that at some point we provided support for multiple versions, and are now removing that. But nothing prevents users from using the version of ruby(1.8) in wheezy on their jessie system. that means they have to keep other packages at their wheezy version, but that's what would happen too if you wanted to run the GTK version from wheezy. Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
