On Fri, Jan 14, 2000 at 12:07:53PM +0000, Matthew Vernon wrote:
> Roman Hodek writes:
> >
> > > debhelper only affects the .deb file, and it should produce correct
> > > .debs regardless of version. "mybe some compilers etc." seems like
> > > FUD to me.
> >
> > Wrong. Take as example that the potato debhelper installs docs into
> > /usr/share/doc, and the stable one to /usr/doc. Same for man pages...
>
> And creates a symlink. So, given slink packages are security fixes:
>
> a) this seems a pretty minor problem, given people will be able to
> read /usr/man/foo and /usr/doc/foo
> b) Adding two lines of code to debian/rules is so mind-blowingly easy
> to do, surely???
Do you know *all* of the two-line pieces of code needed to add to
debian/rules to get a package compiled on a partially-downgraded
unstable system to work properly on a stable machine? And if you
don't have a stable machine available to build it on, where is your
stable machine to test it on? We mustn't release packages into stable
without testing them in the place where they will be used.
I recall fixing an RC bug in the shellutils package a few months ago
because /bin/su wasn't suid root. How did it happen? Well, it had
been built on a not-quite-up-to-date m68k (?) potato system, was
autobuilt for i386, which had a newer version of debhelper, which had
fixed a bug, and thus scotched the suid permissions of the su binary,
whereas the older one hadn't. It was a subtle change and it took me a
while to track down, but if this can happen even within unstable,
there is no way that I would consider building a package for stable on
a non-stable system. There are just too many things which can go
wrong, and we don't want to release packages into stable with new bugs
if at all possible.
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
Donate free food to the world's hungry: see http://www.thehungersite.com/
