Mistaken auto-syncs from Debian unstable or experimental

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 12:24:35PM +0100, James Page wrote:
> I did a quick rebuild test and got build failures on the following
> packages due to API changes:
> 
> FAIL: codenarc
> FAIL: freemind
> FAIL: freeplane
> FAIL: gant
> FAIL: gradle
> FAIL: jenkins
> FAIL: libxbean-java

Nasty.

> I also got a failure with eucalyptus but I know that euca is not
> supported even with 1.8 (they are working on groovy1.7 packages in
> Debian at the moment for their specific versioned requirements).
> 
> I have concern about having this new beta of groovy in precise for two
> key reasons:
> 
> 1) 2.0.0 is a major version bump; from what I can see on the roadmap
> there is significant work going on in this release (hence the major
> version bump).
> 
> 2) Use of invoke-dynamic - upstream are working on using Java 7 invoke
> dynamic language features in groovy 2.0 (although this is not yet in
> trunk) to increase performance (which is the intent of this new
> language feature).  However I don't think we will have good Java 7
> support across all architectures for Precise.

Right.  Thanks, this is why I wanted a domain expert to look at it.

> I've not yet found time to look if there are any runtime issues with
> groovy 2 yet...
> 
> Is there any way we can easily revert this back to the 1.8.x series?

Not easily, unfortunately.  The best alternatives I can offer are:

 * Upload groovy 2.0.0~beta2+really1.8.5-1, which is a copy of 1.8.5-1.
   (Be careful, though, as this will satisfy (build-)dependencies on
   groovy (>= 2.0.0); this is why "revert to previous version" isn't a
   unilaterally safe option in a publicly-available distribution.  If
   there are no such dependencies and unlikely to be in the future then
   you can probably get away with this.)

 * Upload a separate groovy1.8 and convert everything relevant to use
   that.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]