On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 01:39:20PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote: > Since Linux 3.x is a continuation of the 2.6.x series and not a major > change, there was no need to create a new source package for it. > However, we should now rename the source package to 'linux'. > > Currently, most of our bugs are assigned to 'linux-2.6' or > 'src:linux-2.6' so that version-tracking works across binary package > name changes. But if we rename the source package as well, these bugs > will presumably be seen to apply only to versions before the name > change, or only after. How can we avoid this?
The good news is that I don't think this should require fundamental redesign work in order to work gracefully. The bad news is that I think it is going to require some work. The format used for version records should permit a source package to change its name, as long as you preserve the old information in the changelog. For instance, the version file for linux-2.6 currently starts: linux-2.6/3.0.0-3 linux-2.6/3.0.0-2 linux-2.6/3.0.0-1 ... so it could become: linux/3.0.0-4 linux-2.6/3.0.0-3 linux-2.6/3.0.0-2 linux-2.6/3.0.0-1 So, I think what you need is for the bugs to be reassigned to linux or src:linux, but also keep the old version tracking information which indicates that the bug was found in (say) linux-2.6/3.0.0-1. debbugs will know that linux/3.0.0-4 is descended from linux-2.6/3.0.0-1 and so things should keep on working. A normal reassign would discard the version tracking information and you'd have to reapply it afterwards, which would be tedious and error-prone. Perhaps we need to implement a form of reassign that doesn't discard version tracking information, or perhaps we should simply do this by hacking the database in bulk. We might need some work to make pkgreport.cgi?src=linux&dist=stable work gracefully. What I think ought to happen is that it should take the version record for linux and realise that it is descended from a source package called linux-2.6 that's still in stable, and look up the appropriate version for that; but I don't recall implementing anything that clever and I suspect that this does not yet work. We'll also need to consider what happens for users of stable who'll continue to report bugs and expect reportbug to be able to show them listings and so forth. Given the number of bugs involved, perhaps we need to teach debbugs that "linux-2.6" should be considered as an alias for "linux" for the purposes of queries and of input to submit@ and control@. Ben, do you have any constraints on the timeline for this that we should know about? Don, what do you think about all this? I think it's tractable, but it feels like a pretty solid weekend's work to me. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-kernel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110831131316.gb5...@riva.dynamic.greenend.org.uk
