On Mon, Dec 23, 2019 at 06:21:53PM -0500, John Scott wrote:
> > It's not ABI stable, so it's just not suitable for packaging. Every new
> > 3.1.x release would mean a transition for everything built against it.
> > Even if we only uploaded to experimental with the aim to support local
> > builds, a new upload would break everyone's locally built applications.
>
> Upstream appears adamant that it's ready to deploy:
> > Please notice that while 3.1.3 is officially a “development” version because
> > it is not fully compatible with the “stable” 3.0.x, the list of backwards
> > incompatible changes is very short, so you shouldn’t have any problems
> > updating to this version from 3.0.x in practice, and you’re encouraged to
> > use this release, including in production.
It's frustrating that upstream have invented this strange concept of a
development version for use in production, and I've pointed out that
it doesn't work for distros which ship binary packages to them. I've
also tried to encourage them to start a new stable release series
more frequently.
3.1.x is perhaps ready to deploy in a world where it's fine to build all
your own dependencies and statically link them into your app which you
ship direct to users, but that's a different world to Debian.
> I hope you'll reconsider uploading to experimental.
You're asking the package maintainers to take on a significant amount of
extra work here, and I don't see that putting a non-ABI stable package
into experimental is useful enough to justify that effort. People who
really want to try a development version of wxWidgets (or anything else)
can always build it for themselves. Then they get to decide when to
update to the next 3.1.x and have to rebuild all their applications with
the new version.
> It appears that my trouble with wxMaxima is probably fixed in
> wxWidgets 3.1.2 and I'd like to give it a try.
If I'm following, this issue which made you want to try 3.1.x turned out
to already be fixed in Debian unstable some months ago anyway, so the
presence of an experimental package would if anything just have
distracted.
Cheers,
Olly
