Survex 1.2.26 released

[Olly Betts]

On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 09:43:42PM +0000, Wookey wrote:
> +++ Olly Betts [2016-01-13 19:42 +0000]:
> > You'll need to enable "wheezy-backports-sloppy" to get this (the
> > "-sloppy" indicates there's not a simple upgrade path from
> > wheezy+wheezy-backports-sloppy to jessie without backports, but
> > there is to jessie+jessie-backports).
> 
> Erm. I'm a debian developer and I didn't understand that, so I'm not
> sure the rest of the readership will either... 

Sorry, it's kind of hard to explain.

> You are saying that the current 1.2.26 is now available for both
> Debian 8 and Debian 7 (yay!), but there is possibly some gotcha about
> upgrading if using this verison on Debian 7 (wheezy), depending on
> which repositories are enabled? Do users need to care about that? If
> so they will want to know what the tradoff(s) is(are).

It's available for both, but for Debian 7 you'll need to enable the
"-sloppy" backports to get it.  If you just enable the standard
backports, you'd get 1.2.11, as per the "old-bpo" entry in the list on
the left here (that currently shows 1.2.20 for "old-bpo-sl" as it
doesn't update instantly):

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/survex

If you then want to upgrade to Debian 8 without backports, the survex
version there is *older* than what you now have installed.  That's
means you wouldn't get any fixes for security issues or critical bugs
made to the version in Debian 8 (though survex perhaps isn't the sort of
package where that's a major concern - it's not network enabled, and its
relatively low number of installs makes it unlikely attackers would
focus on it).

However, you can upgrade Debian 8 and keep backports enabled to avoid
this pitfall, since the survex version from backports will be at least
as new as what you have installed.

This is all just standard Debian backports rules - see "sloppy
distributions" here:

http://backports.debian.org/Instructions/#index4h2

Cheers,
    Olly