Package: debhelper
Version: 5.0.40
Severity: important
I fear (see below) this might even be RC, it affects many packages built
with debhelper.
Currently, dh_installdebconf adds to ${misc:Depends}
debconf ( >= 0.5) | debconf-2.0
However, at least one important change to debconf is much younger and
only implemented since 1.4.69 (which was post-sarge), and that is the
addition of the error template. Since maintainer scripts should affix
dh_* lines with "|| true", the maintainer script will not fail.
However, an error will usually only be displayed if something of high
urgency has happened. In this case it is usually crucial that the admin
know what has happened and how to fix the situation. With the error
message being implemented, there will probably be many cases where such
information is hard to find elsewhere.
This has hit us (in a particular strange case, with our sid package and
woody versions of grep and debconf...) in bug #395032, but there may be
many more packages in the archive that suffer from this problem.
The reason why I report this as non-RC is that if a package depends on
debconf, the installed debconf will probably be upgraded and configured
before that package during dist-upgrade, which is the recommended
procedure of upgrading.
Regards, Frank
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (99, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.17-2-686
Locale: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] (charmap=ISO-8859-15)
Versions of packages debhelper depends on:
ii binutils 2.15-6 The GNU assembler, linker and bina
ii coreutils [fileutils] 5.2.1-2 The GNU core utilities
ii dpkg-dev 1.10.28 Package building tools for Debian
ii file 4.12-1 Determines file type using "magic"
ii html2text 1.3.2a-2 An advanced HTML to text converter
ii perl 5.8.4-8sarge5 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction
ii po-debconf 1.0 manage translated Debconf template
-- no debconf information
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
