On Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 10:10:33AM -0500, David Wright wrote:
Well, my focus would be on two things: (a) the change in compatibility level in debhelper in the middle of stable's lifetime
That would not have ordinarily happened, and probably shouldn't have happened in this case. Other non-minimal-security changes were backed out for bullseye (namely the change to os-prober behavior) but this was either overlooked or not realized to be a significant change. Usually a stable update package would be modified from the version in stable rather than backported from unstable, but in this case there were no intermediate versions in unstable and it was probably thought safer to use the package which had been tested in unstable rather than starting over and potentially introducing a new bug. That probably was even true, as the problem was identified during the test period on unstable -- but, unfortunately, the priority of the bug didn't bubble up. I think this is just one of those cases where mistakes happen (in this case, several that aligned in an unfortunate way) and regardless of how hard we (humans) try to avoid them sometimes we don't.