Comment 14 for bug 7562

Message-ID: <email address hidden>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2004 14:52:43 +0200
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Frank_K=FCster?= <email address hidden>
To: Pierre Machard <email address hidden>
Cc: <email address hidden>, <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: Bug#267413: tetex-bin: Impossible to process a .tex

@debian-admin: Are there any machines accessible to developers where I
can use sbuild to mimick the buildd environment?

@Pierre: After trying to justify us to some extent, there are some
questions to you - there answers are needed to fix the zope issue.

Pierre Machard <email address hidden> wrote:

>> The first change is documented well in changelog.Debian, the second in
>> NEWS.Debian. We have considered that it would be a debconf abuse to set
>> all the changed questions to unseen again, annoying people, and doubling
>> the information that is yet in the changelog (or NEWS.Debian). Every
>> user running unstable is always told that he knows what he's doing, and
>> should follow development somehow - or at least read changelogs and
>> NEWS.Debian, and I fear this also applies to debian-admin.
>
> I's unbeliveable to read such a statement. What about users who will
> upgrade from woody ?=20

Users upgrading from woody will not encounter problems. There were no
debconf questions in woody, therefore there is nothing that has changed
- for them it will be like a install after a purge, debconf-wise.

> It's your job to deal with that, not the
> debian-admin or any user running sarge, sid or whatever.
>
> Please read the Debian policy carefully:
>
> E.5: Fully-featured maintainer script configuration handling
>
> If you discover a bug in the program which generates the configuration
> file, or if the format of the file changes from one version to the next,
> you will have to arrange for the postinst script to do something
> sensible - usually this will mean editing the installed configuration
> file to remove the problem or change the syntax. You will have to do
> this very carefully, since the user may have changed the file, perhaps
> to fix the very problem that your script is trying to deal with - you
> will have to detect these situations and deal with them correctly.

I must say that I do not know the circumstances of the change that
happened then - I was not active on the tetex maintainers' list, and not
a Debian developer, anyway, back then.

But it might be that people made mistakes with that change; I think
the mechanisms activated by those questions were first introduced as a
test for the bold and brave, and later it was decided that it was good
enough for everybody.

When I got acquainted to the packaging of tetex-*, I didn't even know
about that change (just learned it today), and had no idea on the
impact. And we never had any complaints about that, since about 12
months in which I have been closely following tetex's development.=20

I still fear that people will as well complain if we set the questions
to unseen, and say we abuse debconf. Under normal circumstances, I would
raise this question on debian-devel. This is not normal, both zope and
tetex-bin should try to enter sarge. Therefore I would agree to upload a
new version that shows those questions again, with the new defaults.

The problem is that I am quite sure this will *not* fix the problem for
zope, because on the buildd's tetex-bin is always purged, anyway. I am
currently investigating this in an sbuild environment on i386.

Pierre, which version of tetex-bin did you use for your build of
zope_2.6.4-1.2_i386.deb? This is important, because the problems seem to
be in fact architecture-independent.

Regards, Frank
--=20
Frank K=FCster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie