Nasty dependency/bug situation (with php-zmq, but applicable in general)

[Dominik George]

Hi everybody,

situation is as follows:

I have a package (movim) which just got accepted into sid, and used to
work properly. It now turns out that it is broken with PHP 7.3 - or
rather, php-zmq has issues with PHP 7.3 [1].

Now the situation is as follows:

* The bug is in php-zmq, but only with PHP 7.3.
* Movim does not work due to that, but only with PHP 7.3.
* PHP 7.3 is only in sid, testing has 7.2.

This results in:

* Movim, as it is, does not work in sid.
* Once Movim migrates to testing, it works.

As the issue is mot with movim, I'd rather not mark movim RC-buggy to
stop it from migrating.

Of course, the first step is to mark php-zmq RC-buggy in sid by
reporting the upstream bug with severity grave. But there is actually no
reason to remove php-zmq from testing until php7.3 migrates.

I could tag the bug as only affecting sid - would that prevent
auto-removal from testing? But in any case, this would become incorrect
the moment php7.3 migrates.

What is the correct course of action in such a situation, where a bug is
in package A, but only if package B has version (>> X)?

Cheers,
Nik

[1] https://github.com/mkoppanen/php-zmq/issues/193