Re: Obsolete dependency report, 2015-May-15 [GOLDSTAR]

[Yaakov Selkowitz <yselkowitz at cygwin dot com>]

On Sat, 2015-05-16 at 10:56 +0200, Marco Atzeri wrote:
> I am uploading the dependencies of singular now and testing Yue's last
> monolithic proposal. If it passes the test as expected I will also 
> upload both archs during weekend.

Wonderful!  Thank you very much for helping with this.

Andrew?  This has been a lot more work than an average ITA; could Marco
get two gold stars please?

> Question: as I plan to readjust the package structure it will enough to 
> move the old directories on sourceware
> 
> singular-base   : replaced by singular
> singular-help   : will remain
> singular-icons  : obsoleted
> singular-share  : obsoleted
> singular-surf   : replaced by surf (that is a stand alone package)
> 
> under the singular directory ?

As singular-surf is replaced by surf (and not singular), I moved the
former under the latter instead.  Because surf has a lower version
though, the usual cygport OBSOLETES mechanism doesn't help, so I added
an empty 9999-1 upgrade helper manually.

As for the others, that would be the way to proceed; I already created
x86/release/singular for you and moved those others underneath it.  In
order to provide a smooth upgrade path for users, be sure to do along
the lines of the following:

PKG_NAMES="singular singular-help"
singular_OBSOLETES="singular-base singular-icons singular-share"
singular_CONTENTS=...
singular_help_CONTENTS=...

etc., presuming the rest of the singular packages will have a greater
VERSION-RELEASE than the current ones.

> - I do not consider not using the last hdf5 library a critical issue.
> Upstream is bumping SONAME too many times for my appreciation,
> HDF5-1.8.15 bumped again to libhdf5_10. Two bumps in the raw for a
> minor version release (gr...)

Obsolete library packages, while providing backwards compatibility and
delaying the need for (partial) mass rebuilds, also can end up being the
source of latent security issues and other bugs only fixed in newer
versions.  The reason I started tracking these is that we were never
managing to get rid of much of this cruft; instead they would sit around
for years mostly unmaintained.  I'm just trying to keep people aware of
these so we can keep the distribution in good shape.

WRT HDF5 in particular, as the primary consumer thereof, you way want to
consider only shipping an SONAME version bump in coordination with a new
release or rebuild of netcdf and octave.  After all, a "fixed" newer
version doesn't really help anyone if an SONAME change means nobody is
using it yet.

OTOH you're probably not the only one complaining about this.  Is there
an upstream forum for packagers where you could mention the difficulties
this involves, or chime in on others' who have already mentioned the
same?

> - Octave is on 4.0.0-rc4 so a new package will arrive soon,
>    but I will need to update all octave-forge subpackages.
>    And it will take a while.
> 
> - I will look on R and Lyx but time will be short in the coming weeks.

Don't worry, I understand and know you're very much here with us.  FWIW,
I'm still catching up on the ICU upgrade myself.

--
Yaakov