Package: auto-complete-el Severity: grave Justification: renders package unusable
Dear Maintainer, Debian ships auto-complete-el package version 1.3.1. It was firstly uploaded in July 6th, 2010. The package was not anyway significantly updated for more than 7 years. Since 2010 upstream moved development of auto-complete to GitHub [0] and released three new versions (the latest version for now is 1.5.1, released on March 30th, 2016). Moreover two of these versions (1.4.0 and 1.5.0) contained significant changes, that break backwards compatibility with 1.3.0 branch. Most of the Emacs packages which depend on auto-complete and are available on MELPA require auto-complete version >1.4.0. It makes auto-complete in Debian completely useless, it may also introduce conflicts and unexpected behavior on the systems with auto-complete installed from the Debian archive together with auto-complete installed from, say, MELPA. Having outdated version of auto-complete in Debian makes integration of new Emacs packages (which depend on auto-complete) impossible or at least troublesome. The most notable examples are jedi [1], ein [2], and spacemacs [3], which was requested to be packaged for Debian. Since the mentioned Emacs packages depend on auto-complete version >1.4.0, having outdated auto-complete package in Debian blocks the whole process of their integration. Moreover auto-complete package in Debian uses the obsolete installation mechanisms, where better mechanisms are available with the help of dh_elpa and dh_elpa_test [4]. The package uses deprecated debhelper compat version [5]; has outdated (and non-working) watch file [6]; depends on Emacs versions, which are unavailable anymore in Debian versions (emacs22, emacs23) [7], which previously caused problems with the removal of these versions of Emacs (see referenced bugreport). The version of auto-complete in the Debian archive may work for some outdated and/or obsolete code (Emacs configurations and Emacs packages), but not for the new and modern one. I have not went through the commit history of the auto-complete upstream, but notably that GitHub Issues contains information on more than 200 closed issues (remember, that migration to GitHub happend after the upload of auto-complete 1.3.1 to the Debian archive). Even in the case that only 25% of these issues were real bugs we have about 50 bugs non-fixed in the Debian package. Which is a grave, so to speak. With regards, Lev Lamberov [0] https://github.com/auto-complete/auto-complete/ [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=829589 [2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=695278 [3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=828154 [4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=872616 [5] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=873389 [6] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=872614 [7] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=689312 -- System Information: Debian Release: buster/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.14.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=ru_RU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=ru_RU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages auto-complete-el depends on: ii emacs 47.0 auto-complete-el recommends no packages. auto-complete-el suggests no packages.
