On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 04:46:43AM +0200, Daniel Leidert wrote: > Hi, > > Today I stumbled over the question: After which time should transition > stuff be removed from the debhelper scripts. In this special case I'm > talking about install-sgmlcatalog calls in (e.g.) postinst scripts. Adam > Di Carlo announced the depreciation of install-sgmlcatalogs in 2001. > However, almost all related docbook* packages still contain this stuff. > So I'm wondering, how long one should wait before such obsolete stuff > can be removed? I mean, there is no requirement to support updates from > e.g. Woody to Lenny, right? I checked the Debian Social Contract and the > Policy manuals, but didn't find an information related to this topic. > Maybe I overlooked it? You can drop such things in uploads to unstable after they're included in a stable release. Upgrades across releases are not tested and are officially "not supported" though AFAIK the reasons are largely undocumented. I think it's roughly the same situation as for downgrades:
. maintainer scripts may not support things; this is basically so maintainers are allowed to drop support for ancient things and not have unmanagably large and difficult to test, unmaintanble cruft; . Package control file; including in particular the dependency fields: Conflicts, Depends, Provides (?), Pre-Depend plus Replaces. Dependencies on versions earlier than [old]stable are often dropped. It's only unfortunate that control files afaik still don't support comments to document why the versions and things were there with which to being. . The package itself; eg. it might contain logic to upgrade the format of its datafiles but not for every historic version and bugs therein. Justin References [0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2007/01/msg00241.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
