On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 6:38 PM Peter Müller peter.mueller@ipfire.org wrote:
Eventually, we hoped libloc would be used by other distributions as well, since a decent part of the open source community is facing license trouble after MaxMind changed their terms and conditions. I remember Michael having a discussion with some members of the Debian development team, but my memories fail me when it comes to it's results.
Therefore, I am not sure if libloc is ready in a way we would move from "UNRELEASED" to "unstable". On the one hand, it is used in production for IPFire since a while, on the other hand, nobody else is using the libloc _code_ as such - at least no one I am aware of.
I am in that boat actually, as I ended up looking at the repository with the goal of migrating away from MaxMind, however I am on Ubuntu. The build currently fails due to a bad test invocation which I hope to take a closer look at. Additionally I would like to update the debhelper compatibility level while I am at it, but that also needs to be looked into - whether the resulting build is the same, however for that I would like to have the automated build tooling in place (which needs those test changes).
Regarding the topic of "UNRELEASED" vs "unstable": Having "unstable" for a _released_ version is the standard way for Debian-native packages.
You can take the `debmirror` tool as a simple example. The official upstream changelog there can be seen in the source containing "unstable": https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debmirror/-/blob/debian/1%252.33/debian/chan...
As people are working on future changes, "UNRELEASED" is used for tracking changes until the release is tagged (by replacing "UNRELEASED" with "unstable", and updating the maintainer name/email and date). A sample of work in progress in source can be seen: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debmirror/-/blob/0f9992cdb9b535bd42958a9ff6c...
The tool is available in Ubuntu repositories as well, where additional patches are applied -- replacing Debian defaults with Ubuntu defaults as required for the package. As a result, in Ubuntu a separate version with a 'ubuntu' suffix gets created, while the history still lists "unstable" throughout from its upstream: https://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/universe/d/debmirror/debmirror...
--Valters