Package: release.debian.org Severity: normal User: release.debian.org@packages.debian.org Usertags: unblock X-Debbugs-Cc: 1033400@bugs.debian.org, 1035650@bugs.debian.org, emacs@packages.debian.org We (the Debian Emacsen team) would like to modify bin:elpa-org in bookworm to 1. install no files outside of /usr/share/doc; and 2. newly hard-depend on bin:emacs. A debdiff doesn't seem very useful for review purposes in this case, so I'm not attaching one, but one of us can prepare one if wanted. Nothing has been uploaded yet. (Thank you to bug reporter Maxim Nikulin for suggesting shipping an empty package.) [ Reason ] A number of Emacs addon packages which have their own source packages also have versions shipped in src:emacs's binary packages (upstream calls these "core" ELPA packages). We have them separately packaged mainly because of how Emacs's release cadence does not line up well with Debian's. So having them separately packaged means we can ship newer versions of the addons even if we're having to ship an older version of Emacs. This scheme requires, however, that we don't allow it to ever transpire that the version in src:emacs is newer than the version in the separate source package, because Emacs prefers to load the separately installed version to the bundled version, even when the latter has a higher version number. Unfortunately, src:org-mode is undermaintained, and so precisely that situation has arisen in bookworm. We can resolve this by temporarily changing bin:elpa-org as described above, for bookworm, and then populating it again after the freeze. [ Impact ] If a user installs one of elpa-org's rdeps, such as elpa-org-contrib, then currently this has the effect of *downgrading* the version of Org-mode that Emacs will actually load. This could break all kinds of other things the user has installed, or their own Emacs Lisp code. It also creates confusion, because outside of Debian, you have to try extra hard to create a situation in which you have an older version of Org-mode loaded than the one that ships with Emacs. So users might report bugs to upstreams that are caused only by this strange situation in Debian. [ Tests ] The test would be to 'apt-get install elpa-org-contrib', start Emacs, and use 'M-x org-version' to confirm that you get version 9.5.5. We'd want to run all possible piuparts tests too. [ Risks ] This might expose bugs in other leaf packages that turn out not to be compatible with the newer Org-mode. However, that's preferable to the current situation. The emacsen-common scripts might not like the situation in which a package suddenly ships nothing. piuparts testing would reveal whether this is actually a problem. I'm sorry that this hasn't been done yet: I don't myself have time to do anything other than write up this unblock request, and I thought it would be appropriate to ask for your opinion on the basic idea before doing anything else. unblock org-mode/9.5.2+dfsh-5 -- Sean Whitton
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