]] Andreas Beckmann > On 2017-03-09 18:00, Ian Jackson wrote: > > To be fair to Pirate, Andreas Beckmann suggested #856606 that if > > Pirate disagreed with Andreas, Pirate should go to the TC. > > The disagreement between Pirate and me is not about the RC-ness of > #856606, but more about the general requirement of working upgrade paths. > > This is my understanding of Pirate's point: > > "Package P hasn't been part of any stable release so far, therefore > upgrades from earlier package versions don't have to be supported. > So not having a working upgrade path from version 1.2-3 in testing > to version 1.2-5 unstable is not a bug."
>From reading through the bug log, that is my understanding of his point as well. The upgrade is from a previous version of gitlab that has been in stretch for a little under a month (it went into testing on 2017-02-18). I think it's completely clear that failure to support upgrades (even between short-lived versions that only hit unstable) is a bug. For versions that hit testing, even more so. In the typical cases where we don't support upgrades between major versions (think apache 1 → 2), we typically renamed the packages involved. That seems overly heavy-handed in this case where the upgrade path can just be fixed (see mail from Phil Hands for some suggestions), but it points to what the bar is. The guidelines are more lax for experimental where people have been known to not make it possible to move to testing/unstable versions of the package without reinstalling/reconfiguring it. I think this is, and should be, discouraged but allowed. Experimental exists for a reason: to be able to conduct experiments, and sometimes you need to burn the experiment to the ground afterwards. > I didn't find anything in the policy about upgrade requirements ... > but I think there is a general agreement that direct upgrades must work > (and only skipping over stable releases is not supported). There are a lot of requirements for packages that are not written in policy. There's no requirement in Policy as written that changelogs must be in English, for instance. -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
