Restoring debhelper dh5 compat for the LTS?

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

On Wed, 23 Mar 2022 at 15:02, Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> Le 23/03/2022 à 15:58, Dimitri John Ledkov a écrit :
> > It's best to upgrade packaging to compat level 13. Sounds like a long
> > overdue packaging upkeep.
>
> Yes it's better, but it requires work, do we have the resources to deal
> with those, especially for universe?
>
> Also you claim it produces buggy debs but do we have any report of such
> problems or any way to grep the archive to figure out special cases we
> know about that would give a non working binary?
>

See bug reports against debhelper, reverts, and ultimate removal of
support for old compat levels.
Existing binaries built with old debhelper are fine. Building binaries
using latest debhelper but old compat levels are risky and produce
buggy binaries, which are hard to track down.
Debhelper upstream tried to keep working and improving new compat
levels, whilst maintaining support for old ones, and eventually ran
into the wall of not being able to reliable maintain that.

As part of the release process we perform archive wide rebuilds, and
fix all FTBFS for the release across the full archive. We can't
release Ubuntu without fixing those. Thus yes, there is an explicit
mandate, especially for the universe, to be buildable. It can be
resolved by fixing & upgrading packaging, or via removal of those
packages from the archive. These packages are likely to be
ubuntu-specific and/or niche leaf packages, not present in Debian.

Regards,

Dimitri.