gettext, autopoint and cvs

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Hello.

I'm considering to move autopoint, from gettext, to a separate package
called "autopoint". By popular demand, but also because it is the
"right thing" to do if gettext is not going to depend on cvs.

(Moreover it would be a nice "Architecture: all" package which would
remove about 385K of stuff from gettext).

Could someone please calculate how many packages currently build-depend
on cvs in unstable? (That would be an upper estimation of how many
packages would I break in unstable by doing this).

Plan A is to do the move and fix all the required packages in
unstable, if the release managers do not object. For each affected package,
the fix would be quite easy: Whenever packages has cvs in build-depends
because they use autopoint, they should use autopoint instead.

Plan B would be to create autopoint as an empty package which depends
on gettext and cvs. Then we encourage packages to build-depend on autopoint,
but without making it a release goal. Then we switch to Plan A when
the number of affected packages is small enough.

My personal preference would be to follow Plan A and do all the changes
before the release of squeeze.

Thanks.