+1 maintenance report

[Matthias Klose]

On 07.02.24 09:17, Utkarsh Gupta wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 7, 2024 at 6:17 AM Pushkar Kulkarni
> <pushkar.kulkarni at canonical.com> wrote:

>> === freedombox/bootstrapform ===
>> The freedombox package depends on bootstrapform. Autopkgtests of the
>> former fail because the latter imports distutils. I did a Debian MR
>> [15] to replace distutils.StrictVersion with packaging.Version. But I
>> now see bootstrapform also failing, independent of this merge request,
>> with Python 3.12. Test pipelines on the MR are failing and this needs
>> more investigation.
>>
>> [15] https://salsa.debian.org/freedombox-team/python-django-bootstrap-form/-/merge_requests/4
> 
> I wonder what upstream thinks about it. Also it'd be nice to have this
> forwarded to upstream and get a review before landing it.

sorry, we cannot do that unless we skip the 24.04 release and make 24.10 
an LTS release instead. distutils had been deprecated two years ago, so 
if an upstream didn't act on it until now, why are you confident that it 
would be done in the remaining weeks up to our planned release?

we will always have to pick a point in time for such a basic change, 
where hopefully most upstreams are already supporting a new Python 
version, and for the remaining ones either backporting unreleased 
upstream fixes, or writing our own fixes.

In this specific case, the replacement seems to be safe, and for the 
LooseVersion variant, we are looking at providing 
https://pypi.org/project/looseversion/

Matthias