14 January 2010

Sometimes things get complicated... (Handling upgrades from Karmic)

I'm the package maintainer for Autokey in Debian. Upstream recently changed from using GTK+ to Qt4, which caused more than one complaint from users of testing.

The GTK+ version of the package is published in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic. While upstream is continuing to do regular releases of the GTK version, they are focusing on the KDE version and have changed autokey to refer to the KDE version, while renaming the GTK version (formally autokey) to autokey-gtk. To make matters worse, upstream releases both as separate tarballs, and the packages conflict with one another.  (due to technical limitations)

What's the proper proceedure for handling this in Ubuntu? Should -gtk conflict with autokey, replace it, with autokey-qt being available as an option, or should I just keep things as they are and have the package "change out from under" users when they upgrade?
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1 comment:

  1. Ronan14 January, 2010 23:17

    Funny, I use Autokey and wondered the same some days ago :)

    My two cents (note: I'm a Ubuntu user):
    1. The majority of *buntu users are Ubuntu users
    2. Kubuntu users are probably more "advanced" users
    a. KDE is made/advertised to give more choice/options/power
    b. These users _made_ the choice to use KDE, meaning they at least know what it is and its virtues/problems, and will be probably less puzzled by these packaging subtleties

    This considered, I'd suggest making things as dead simple as possible for Ubuntu users: autokey-gtk should replace autokey

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