Niels Thykier wrote: > I think we owe ourselves to be honest and agree whether we do this or > not. The proposed opt-in solution will almost certainly end up being a > slow translation to saying "yes we are going to do this" - it will just > defer the answer 5 - 10 years with a lot of extra work. > > And if we are going to that, I would rather do it fully automatic from > the start. Either "flag day"-style or "next compat level"-style.
Agreed. One request as well: let's *please* not base any aspect of this on the current date; that would make builds not reproducible. Instead, let's base this on the date of the most recent changelog entry. Concrete proposal for something that will hopefully keep people reasonably happy as a default, and should result in reproducible builds: - Keep a list of Debian release dates in debhelper. - Look in the changelog for the most recent entry that looks like a normal upload to unstable (not a stable update or security update); that way, we have a full record of all stable/security updates. - Compare the date of that changelog entry to the Debian release dates plus 7 days of additional slack (to allow for slightly mis-dated changelogs, time zone issues, or similar). - Keep changelog entries going back to the preceding release, or 10 changelog entries, or until the last time the upstream version number changed, whichever is largest. - Provide one additional option to keep only N entries maximum regardless of the above heuristic; that will help packages that have huge changelogs, or exclusively Debian revisions and no new upstream version. Does that sound like a reasonable default? - Josh Triplett
