Hello Adrian, Having thought about this, I come to the conclusion that you are right (with some small caveat, see below). But I'd like to tell you why it took me so long, and caused a sometimes emotional discussion.
When you submitted the bug and subsequently were told that there were already plans how to do it, I had hoped that you would read the old threads in the archive (or ask for pointers). If you'd have told us "I've read <link>, but I think the same can be achieved much easier:...", I would have been much more open to your suggestions. The way it was, we were discussing each point bit by bit, and I had the impression that you didn't think about *all* the consequences of your proposal, but instead just wanted to push your idea. Probably that impression was wrong, but still I had it. So okay, I think that we might get rid of libkpathsea3 faster if we rename libkpathsea4-dev to libkpathsea-dev, and request binary NMUs if needed. But there's one thing left I'm not sure about: If the tetex-bin source package provides a libkpathsea-dev binary package, doesn't that mean that the libkpathsea3 source package, which provides the same binary package, must disappear from the respecitve distribution? If that's true, tetex-bin wouldn't be able to enter testing until all packages that depend on the libkpathsea3 binary package have switched to libkpathsea4, *and* entered testing. Since there might be other, unrelated RC bugs in them, this would be a problem for tetex-bin. If I'm not mistaken with this analysis, we would additionally have to do a reupload of the libkpathsea3 source package, renaming the development package to libkpathsea3-dev. No, that wouldn't even work, since it couldn't [1] migrate to testing before all packages that Build-Depend on libkpathsea-dev have switched to libkpathsea4-dev (or libkpathsea3-dev, for that matter). I'm quite sure that you again have a clever solution for that (earnest, since you have thought a lot about the disadvantages of testing migration and probably about how to circumvent them), but I'm at a loss currently. Regards, Frank Footnotes: [1] I don't know whether the testing scripts actually check for satisfied Build-Dependencies, but I think we shouldn't deliberately break them. -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX)
