FWIW, I brought this up at our weekly developer meeting, and there was also another concern about apt upgrades across softforks: It could be problematic to not deploy a softfork, and problematic to deploy one without the user's consent.
I think I recall Debian has a way for packages to interactively prompt the user during upgrade. Maybe if softforks were turned into a runtime option, that could resolve that issue. What do you think? For reference, the meeting log: https://bitcoin.jonasschnelli.ch/ircmeetings/logs/bitcoin-core-dev/2021/bitcoin-core-dev.2021-01-07-19.00.moin.txt Luke On Thursday 07 January 2021 18:24:39 Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > Quoting Luke Dashjr (2021-01-07 18:26:43) > > > We (upstream) already elaborated many years ago, copied here: > > > > http://luke.dashjr.org/tmp/code/20130723-linux-distribution-packaging-and > >-bitcoin.md.asc > > > > At a minimum, to be safe, Debian would need to: > > > > 1) Either: > > 1a) Build with the bundled LevelDB statically linked. > > 1b) Guarantee LevelDB package remains consensus-compatible, including NOT > > fixing any bugs without a proper consensus-compatibility audit. > > 2) Backport (at least) security fixes for Debian's security support > > period. Upstream, we generally only maintain releases for a year or so at > > most. > > Thanks for your input on upstream position on this matter, Luke, and in > particular this condensed summary. It is helpful for Debian to make its > decision. > > > - Jonas
