Re: Bug#1054657: transition: r-bioc-biocgenerics
On 2023-11-07 14:38:13 +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi Sebastian,
>
> Am Tue, Nov 07, 2023 at 10:53:00AM +0100 schrieb Sebastian Ramacher:
> > Control: tags -1 moreinfo
>
> I admit I'm not really happy about the bug ping-pong.
>
> > > I just finished inspecting by eye the homepage of each of the 69 new
> > > Bioconductor packages. None of them declare a reverse-dependency to
> > > an existing Bioc package that we ship in Debian.
> >
> > We do not care about new reverse dependencies.
>
> Seems there is some misunderstanding. Charles has inspected pacckages
> *outside* Debian whether they might be pulled by new versions of
> packages *inside* Debian. These would be candidates for new packages.
>
> > We care about new
> > dependencies of packages currently in the archive. So what's the status
> > of new the dependencies?
>
> Charles and I tried to explain in different ways: We do not have simple
> means to answer this question.
Picking a random r-bioc-* package:
https://salsa.debian.org/r-pkg-team/r-bioc-aroma.light/-/blob/master/DESCRIPTION
has an "Imports" field. Those are mapped to dependencies in the package.
So I presume that when importing those packages into the packaging
repository, changes to this field can be identified and checked. I would
excpect this information to be enough to identify any currently missing
packages.
> But I had a different question; What
> exactly is the problem of a transition taking about 1 month due to some
> delay by waiting for packages in new?
>
> I somehow have the feeling that this transition is currently delayed by
> some bug-mail / tagging ping-pong which is demotivating for both sides.
> You make a request to some volunteers to do some extra work that was not
> requested before and we volunteers explained that it is really hard
> work. I think it is fair to ask for the reasons you want us to do some
> work which is definitely hard to do and for us painful and unproductive.
We should have requested this information for all transitions in the
past. We did not and thus had the same problems for the last couple of
transitions including missing packages and a significant number of
autopkgtest regressions.
The r-bioc-* transition is special in the sense that it requires all
involved packages to be ready to migrate at the same time. This is where
delays become an issue. It essentially blocks all other transitions that
could potentially overlap (e.g., auto-hdf5) from being started or
progressing.
All of that binds resources on our side to track down the remaining bits
and pieces to make everything migrate at the same time. This is usually
not an issue with a typical shared library transition. Hence we are
asking you to identify possible NEW packages that will be required to
complete the transition.
Cheers
--
Sebastian Ramacher
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