Hi Kate,

Le 12/07/2024 à 13:52, Kate Deplaix a écrit :

Sorry to bother you all. As one of the opam maintainer, i would like to
get more insights on how the debian package for opam is maintained.

The package doesn't seem to have a permanent maintainer and my attempt
to contact mehdi failed.

The package currently is out-of-date in several ways:

*
stable has a 3 years out-of-date version: 2.1.2

Packages are updated in stable only under exceptional circumstances,
that's the definition of stable :-) And I don't see any reason to update
opam there.

*
testing is fine with 2.1.6 (although i would suggest 2.2.0)
*
sid is still on 2.1.6 despite 2.2.0 being out

Usually, sid is a quarantine for testing so they are in sync most of the
time.

I see opam 2.2.0 has been released only two weeks ago. Please note that
the update of a Debian package is never automatic: someone has to do
something. And for Debian/OCaml packages, all this work is voluntary.
Two weeks (on even a month or two) is reasonable delay (IMHO) to update
a package in the Debian/OCaml world (we are not so well-staffed).

I do have a QA routine to check discrepancies with the OPAM world:

https://salsa.debian.org/ocaml-team/opam-debian-switch

I run it every few weeks, and this allows us to get up-to-date OCaml
packages in Debian... usually. But it doesn't work for opam itself,
since opam is not installed with opam :-(

I'm personally ready to help (I've already personally helped upgrade
Alpine, Homebrew, MacPorts, Void-Linux, Archlinux, Nixpkgs), but the
process to do that in Debian seems convoluted compared to the above
mentioned distributions.

Of course, any help is welcome... but you you'll have to get familiar
with Debian procedures. I think there is plenty of documentation out
there. If you have some specific question, you can ask me (or here).

How can i help? (I'm not a Debian user anymore)
I was able to get an account on Salsa after battling with the gatekeeper
but I'm not sure what's the next step. Untar the archive and update the control and rules files?

Usually, it's conceptually as easy as that, we have tools that make all
this very efficient.

I started to do it for opam, and realized new dependencies have popped.
This is usually the reason why packages take time to be updated.
(Changing the build system is another common reason.) At least opam-0install-cudf, spdx_licenses and swhid_core are not yet in Debian,
those three will have get packaged first. The process of adding a new
package to Debian is subject to additional review and can take time,
don't hold your breath.

I will add the three mentioned packages and get back to you when I am
back on opam.


Cheers,

--
Stéphane

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)