banshee backport (some questions)

On 11/13/05, Sebastian Dröge <mail at slomosnail.de> wrote:
> On So, 2005-11-13 at 10:22 -0500, John Dong wrote:
> > We'd like it all to be Dapper sources. I've talked to tseng briefly
> > about Mono backports, and he was OK with the idea, since no big mono
> > changes have occurred.
> >
> > Maybe we'll get that started soon.
>
> No, he told you that 'mono' is fine... only the mono package not the
> complete mono stack. monodoc for example will be problematic so please
> don't do it.
>
> That's exactly why I ask... so we have 2 options here... either using a
> modified ipod-sharp sourcepackage for the backports or no banshee
> backported at all.

I don't want to search through my irclogs, but exactly this point was
my biggest concerns when we discussed inclusion of official backports
to ubuntu. That time, the backporters team said that they will never
need to actually touch the source package. I had my concerns, because
sometimes backporting is more than just recompiling, especially in
debian, where the gap between stable and testing can be quite big. But
obviously, recompiling works surprisingly well, mainly because the
difference (e.g. in toolchain packages) between dapper and breezy
isn't that big.

It was imo just a matter of time when this problem would arise. The
fact is that we agreed that time that official backports are really
just recompilation of sources from the development branch. So if you
really want to have 'real' maintainer uploads to -backports, I'd
suggest working on a well written spec describing a clear policy what
is to be done when doing these uploads.  This spec/proposal would
definitely need blessing from the technical board again.

Until this happens, I see no other choice than providing selected
packages in personal package archives. This would mean dubious 3rd
party archives again and the resulting problems with supporting our
users. :(

> Or I could upload a stripped ipod-sharp to dapper, this one gets
> backported and I add monodoc support again. But this seems to be
> braindead to me... and I won't like to do it

what would you do when you need to update the package in
breezy-backports again? Imo this would be a nightmare, please don't.

--
regards,
    Reinhard