Rationale ========= The going thing in exciting release-criticality in unstable right now is the C++ ABI transition. Although most libraries have by this point been rebuilt with g++-4.0 (at least on i386), there are large numbers of applications that are yet to be transitioned. Because any C++ packages in testing cannot be rebuilt (for security support or otherwise) until they have completed the ABI transition, these packages have release critical bugs which in many cases have not yet been filed. However, it's not all that useful to file RC bug reports about the transition for packages that can't actually be transitioned yet; the C++ transition has already been announced repeatedly, so telling maintainers that their packages *will* need to transition doesn't add any new information. What *is* useful is to identify those packages which are ready to be transitioned, and file bugs against those packages. This both lets the maintainer know the package is ready in case they haven't noticed yet, and lets others know that it's appropriate to NMU the package if the maintainer doesn't upload. Bug list ======== At http://people.debian.org/~vorlon/c++-transition-needed.txt, there is a list of packages in unstable which depend on C++-based library packages that have already transitioned. The list is grouped by library, because it's logical to try to focus on one library's reverse-dependencies at a time since that's how they have to be transitioned to testing; but please take care not to file duplicate bug reports against packages which depend on more than one C++ library. Procedure ========= In order to avoid filing duplicate bugs, or filing bugs against packages that are not actually ready to be transitioned (despite appearing on this package list!), please follow a few simple guidelines. Before even looking at the package, look at the BTS to make sure no bug has been filed yet for this issue. There are two pages that you should check for this: the page for the source package which provides the broken binary, and the page for the transition for the particular library. The per-transition pages are implemented using usertags (our hottest new BTS feature!). The URL for each page is http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?which=tag&users=debian-release@lists.debian.org&data=transition- where is the name of the library that the package *currently* depends on (i.e., the library's name before the C++ transition). For example, the transition page for tracking packages which still depend on libxbase2.0-0c102 is: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?which=tag&users=debian-release@lists.debian.org&data=transition-libxbase2.0-0c102 If the bug is listed on the source package's page, but is not yet listed on the library transition page, please add a usertag to the bug by sending a mail to control@bugs.debian.org with the following commands in the body: user debian-release@lists.debian.org usertag 123456 + name-of-the-tag where 123456 is the bug number, and name_of_the_tag is a tag name following the same "transition-" pattern used above. Before filing any bugs, please check that the libraries the package depends on have *fully* transitioned in unstable, on all architectures. You can quickly check the build status of a library's source package using . If the libraries have not yet been built and uploaded on all architectures, then the packages which depend on it cannot be transitioned. If you have determined that no bug has yet been filed about rebuilding the package, you should check whether the package is really ready to be rebuilt, and whether it *can* be rebuilt. To do this, you will want to try to build the package in a clean, up-to-date unstable environment. If you aren't running unstable, or you don't know how to ensure that it's a clean unstable system, it is recommended that you build packages in a chroot. The pbuilder package can be useful for this; pbuilder documentation can be found at . If the package fails to build because the build-dependencies are uninstallable, then the package is obviously not ready to transition, so please don't file a bug! But it's also possible that the package may build on one or more architectures, even if some of its libraries are not yet transitioned. Please check this as well, by installing the package and running ldd for each of the binaries it contains. If "libstdc++.so.5" appears in the output of ldd for any of these binaries, then its build-dependencies have not all made the C++ ABI transition yet! If neither of these two issues applies, then it's appropriate to file a bug on the package. If you have questions about how to file bugs in general, please ask on the channel. For these particular bugs, please file the bug at severity: serious, and include the following information in your report: - note that the package is no longer installable in unstable - tell the maintainer that the reverse-dependencies have transitioned, and that their package is ready to be uploaded - identify any additional issues you encountered while trying to build the package Thanks for participating in this weekend's BSP!