[1648] in athena10
Changes to debathena-alpine-config
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Evan Broder)
Sat Mar 14 01:31:10 2009
Message-ID: <49BB40EA.5000304@mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2009 01:30:18 -0400
From: Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>
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To: debathena@mit.edu
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Tim asked me to send mail explaining the zephyr discussion about
alpine-config today, so here it is:
The big change made to debathena-alpine-config today was changing the
package from
Depends: alpine
Recommends: debathena-alpine
to
Depends: debathena-alpine
This was coincident to changing debathena-clients from depending on
debathena-alpine-config to recommending it (so that debathena-clients
remains installable without the debathena-system component enabled)
This change should affect Debathena Hardy more than any other release.
Ubuntu included alpine 1.0 in hardy, but put alpine 2.00 in
hardy-backports. Since we debathenify without backports, we debathenify
1.0. 2.00 wins against 1.0 in the version number battle, meaning that a
user with hardy-backports enabled will get a non-debathenified alpine
instead of ours.
Since debathena-alpine-config sets inbox-path and folder-collections to
values involving hesiod, the pine.conf provided by
debathena-alpine-config did not work against the alpine in
hardy-backports (you'd get a mysterious error to the effect of
/mit/broder/Public/hardy-alpine.png). Given that we require the patched
behavior, the dependencies seem clearly wrong as they were.
For some context, we're hoping that network will soon switch the PO
servers to accepting GSSAPI authentication on *.mail.mit.edu. Once this
happens, we no longer need either the Hesiod patch or the krb4 patch to
alpine, and the homedir permissions patch can be replaced by a wrapper
script. In other words, alpine would no longer need to be debathenified.
One alternative to what I implemented would have been to change the
debathenificator to debathenify alpine 2.00 for Hardy. However, we would
then be eliminating choice because our alpine 2.00 would always win
against the alpine 1.0 in hardy for users who didn't want to turn on
backports.
This way, users with -backports turned on will be forced down to 1.0 for
the time being, but when we can lift the requirement specifically on a
debathenified alpine, they'll be able to upgrade back to 2.00. It
temporarily sucks, but is better in the long term.
I also reverted geofft's commit about aspell, in favor of handling that
upstream (LP #340993 for Jaunty). I suspect we wouldn't have too much
trouble pushing for an SRU for Hardy and Intrepid, and whatever Debian's
post-release fix process is for Lenny, so we should go ahead and try.
I also switched to using DEB_TRANSFORM_FILES instead of
DEB_DIVERT_FILES. Theoretically, this should be a purely aesthetic
change to the source package, but I'm not sure I trust my Perl enough to
believe that.
I'll be leaving this package in -proposed for feedback until Wednesday
or so, at which point I'll move it into production.
- Evan
