[Koha-devel] Koha packaging problems (Deb10/Buster)

[Mason James]

Hi Koha devs

We have a dependency problem with the release of debian-10 and the following packages. (debian-11 is ok)

 libmojolicious-perl
 libmojolicious-plugin-openapi-perl
 libyaml-libyaml-perl


The packages require specific versions to be built for specific debian releases, due to their dependencies.
This type of problem has occurred before: an example is the libcryptx-perl/ubuntu-16.04 bug. or elasicsearch with jessie...
 https://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=23128

The specifics of the dependency problem are quite complex so I wont bore you unless you really ask :)

It seems the best solution is to create a new 'distro' repo that contains a small number of additional distro-specific packages. This should allow us to support every type of koha/distro (and arch) combination


Here's an example of a Koha sources.list file...  (We can name the distro releases/aliases as we please)

 deb http://debian.koha-community.org/koha [19.05|19.11|stable|oldstable|oldoldstable] main
 deb http://debian.koha-community.org/distro [debian9|ubuntu16.04|bionic|ubuntu-oldstable|stable] main


FYI: It's possible to add the distro-specific packages to the existing 'koha' repo, but that should probably be avoided due to managing the extra complexity (its cleaner to separate the two repos imho)


Two other options...
 1/ use kc.org debian packages, with cpanminus (or similar) providing the distro specific packages (extra installation steps and complexity)
 2/ ignore the problem for now, and accept that older koha/distro combinations will be forced to break

Does anyone have any other solutions that I have missed, or a better solution even?


Cheers, Mason