Please backport apt-clone (0.2.1) from precise

[Michael Vogt]

This again is a bit of a unusual request.

In order to make it possible to test upgrades from lucid -> precise we would like to ask users to submit their "machine-profile". The tool to do this is apt-clone. Its not available in lucid, so I would like to get a backport. The difficulty here is that it uses dh_python2 which is not available in lucid. I did a (trivial) port from dh-python2 to python-central in lp:~mvo/apt-clone/lucid-backport. I would like to ask for a exception to get the package into lucid-backports even if it means to modify it. If you approve this request, I'm happy to take care of doing the actual upload.

Cheers,
 Michael

[Evan Broder (broder)]

Hey Michael -

This actually sounds like a more or less standard backport request. Tweaking the package to deal with toolchain changes is completely acceptable - we have to do it with some regularity.

However, in order to make sure the non-LTS upgrade path is still safe, we would also need to backport apt-clone to maverick, natty, and oneiric. I'll go ahead and open bug tasks. Maverick should have dh_python2, so I'm assuming that no source changes will be required for any of those.

It also looks like apt-clone has 1 reverse-dependency and 1 reverse-build-dependency in both natty and oneiric:

apt-clone
---------
* ubiquity
  [ ] natty (Reverse-Depends)
  [ ] oneiric (Reverse-Depends)
* update-manager
  [ ] natty (Reverse-Build-Depends)
  [ ] oneiric (Reverse-Build-Depends)

As far as I can tell, using ubiquity outside of the live CD environment doesn't make any sense, so I don't think we need to enforce testing that one, so that just leaves update-manager.

So that makes this a more or less standard backport, and we just have a few things that need to be tested:

 - Please make sure that the package builds/installs/runs without modification on maverick/natty/oneiric (I'm assuming you've already tested lucid)
 - Please make sure that natty and oneiric's update-manager still works with the backported apt-clone.

The backports team will do a final once-over after the testing is done, so please change the status of the bug tasks to Confirmed when you've done the testing, and we'll take another look.

Thanks

[Evan Broder (broder)]

Oh yeah - I'm not familiar with the history of apt-clone, but if the versions of apt-clone in natty or oneiric are sufficient for your needs, we can always backport from there instead and reduce the testing required - feel free to modify the bug yourself if you'd prefer that.

[Micah Gersten (micahg)]

Marking the maverick task as invalid since the release is EOL