Re: Downgradeability of backports
Am 18.09.2016 um 19:15 schrieb Christian Seiler:
> Dear backports ftp-masters,
>
> I'm thinking about backporting open-iscsi from Stretch to Jessie
> (together with open-isns, as that's a new dependency [1]). The
> reason is that newer open-iscsi versions add support for a new
> daemon called 'iscsiuio' that allows offloading of iSCSI
> sessions to special network cards. I know of at least one user
> who's already backporting this for themselves, and of other
> users who've requested iscsiuio support.
>
> The problem is that I completely redid the startup logic in sid's
> open-iscsi package (completely unrelated to iscsiuio), it's now
> much more robust than before. However, because of technical
> details, downgrading is not an option - at all. Since iSCSI is
> storage (and potentially your root filesystem), this is so bad
> that I've added a prerm debconf prompt to the package in Stretch
> and sid to detect downgrades below the version this was changed,
> and warn the user not to shoot themselves in the foot.
>
> Now I know that downgrades are not officially supported in Debian
> at all, but from practical experience I know that lots of people
> may downgrade software from backports back to stable if they're
> not completely happy with it. In case of something like an office
> suite, that's perfectly fine, because it's no problem to purge it
> completely and reinstall the old version, but with open-iscsi this
> is not that easy, especially if your root filesystem is on it.
>
> Hence my question: since I already have the debconf prompt in the
> stretch package, is it acceptable to upload this to backports?
> Or would the downgradeability issue be a blocker here?
Do not waste your time in downgradeability, since it is mostly not
possible. Think of packages with a database, where a downgrade to an
older schema is also not possible.
If a user decides to downgrade again, it is a better idea to use a
backup or to setup the package from scratch.
So there is no issue in your package and no show stopper. :)
--
/*
Mit freundlichem Gruß / With kind regards,
Patrick Matthäi
GNU/Linux Debian Developer
Blog: http://www.linux-dev.org/
E-Mail: pmatthaei@debian.org
patrick@linux-dev.org
*/
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