Hi David, generally speaking, php-pear is only useful as dependencies to other Debian packages, so it only needs to stay compatible with the one single release matching whatever we just have.
Packaging php-pear was always absolute PITA, so if you find a way to do it differently, I would be delighted! Ondrej -- Ondřej Surý (He/Him) A gentle nudge is always appreciated if I take a little longer to reply. > On 31. 10. 2026, at 14:43, David Prévot <[email protected]> wrote: > > Package: php-pear > Version: 1:1.10.18+submodules+notgz-1 > Severity: wishlist > > tl;dr: what kind of backward compatibility do we need to maintain? > > Hi Ondřej and all, > > While upgrading php-pear to its latest upstream version, I had to fight > with git submodules. With the current global move from PEAR to Composer > to distribute PHP code, upstreams follow the usual flow or sickness of > adding .gitattributes files to exclude tests and other valuable pieces > of code from their source tarball. That messed our usual workflow in the > PHP PEAR (and Composer) Maintainers team, but we managed to find our way > around it [1]. On the other hand, it messes a lot with the current > packaging workflow of php-pear, that needs to remove .gitattributes > files from of its git submodules. > > I’d like to update the packaging workflow of this package, maybe using > multiple upstream tarballs as allowed with the 3.0 (quilt) source > format, or maybe more simply with a package split of its dependencies (I > haven’t looked at the specifics yet). > > I’m well aware of the need to **not** build-depend on pkg-php-tools, > since that would introduce a dependency loop, but are there any other > requirements? Ondřej, I know you put a lot of work to maintain the > PHP ecosystem on multiple Debian (and more) release versions, do you > need to have php-pear around too? If so, what is the older Debian > release you need to support? I don’t want to introduce backward > incompatible changes that would make your life harder. > > 1: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DebianPHPGroup/Composer#Upstream_handling > > Regards, > > taffit > <signature.asc>
