Hi R-Team,I was about to file the bug below, but after a second thought I realised what I'm seeing seems to be a pattern that might be better to be discussed outside of the BTS against the packages that trigger these issues. It appears to me that CRAN doesn't document which older packages break with certain uploads, something that's becoming more important in Debian these days for packages involved in autopkgtesting. Three out of 4 packages I mention below aren't broken in unstable, so apparently rmatrix (like recently lme4) can break packages in testing that with *some other package* from unstable would pass. Likewise, I suspect that there's an other package missing an update in unstable that would fix the forth package. Are there ideas how to track these kind of versioned dependencies (and/or Breaks) better (and more automated)?
As a note, you probably know that I've been (semi-automated) filing a lot of autopkgtest regression bugs and out-of-sync bugs in the last couple of years. For the former class (autopkgtest regression) I had been ignoring r-* packages because the situation already seemed messy to me, but now with several out-of-sync issues in key packages, I feel that I can no longer ignore that problem. So, this message is mostly to trigger discussion about how to improve the r-* ecosystem in Debian with respect to versioned dependencies and autopkgtest. Any comments or ideas?
PaulTitle: src:rmatrix: fails to migrate to testing for too long: triggers autopkgtest failures
Source: rmatrix Version: 1.5-3-1 Severity: serious Control: close -1 1.6-0-1 X-Debbugs-CC: debian-r@lists.debian.org Tags: sid trixie User: release.debian.org@packages.debian.org Usertags: out-of-sync Control: affects -1 src:r-cran-ggeffects src:r-cran-insight Control: affects -1 src:r-cran-performance src:r-cran-tmb Dear maintainer(s),The Release Team considers packages that are out-of-sync between testing and unstable for more than 30 days as having a Release Critical bug in testing [1]. Your package src:rmatrix has been trying to migrate for 31 days [2]. Hence, I am filing this bug. The version in unstable triggers autopkgtest failures for r-cran-ggeffects (recently updated and passes in unstable), r-cran-insight (passes in unstable), r-cran-performance (recently updated and passes in unstable) and r-cran-tmb (new upstream version available).
If a package is out of sync between unstable and testing for a longer period, this usually means that bugs in the package in testing cannot be fixed via unstable. Additionally, blocked packages can have impact on other packages, which makes preparing for the release more difficult. Finally, it often exposes issues with the package and/or its (reverse-)dependencies. We expect maintainers to fix issues that hamper the migration of their package in a timely manner.
I have immediately closed this bug with the version in unstable, so if that version or a later version migrates, this bug will no longer affect testing. I have also tagged this bug to only affect sid and trixie, so it doesn't affect (old-)stable.
rmatrix is a key package, so this bug isn't going to affect the package. I sincerely hope it will trigger appropriate actions.
Paul [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/06/msg00001.html [2] https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?package=rmatrix
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