Oldest debian based distributions we support and their debhelper versions:
debian 8
[217/227] installing debhelper-9.20150101
debian 9
[231/233] installing debhelper-10.2.5
ubuntu 18.04
[240/243] installing debhelper-11.1.6ubuntu1
I'm expecting we are however supporting distirbutions with debhelper < 9.20160709 (please check!) so we must find another solution.
Yes, for debian 8 we have a lower version.
laforge: how long do we want to keep building packages for debian 8? It reached end of support for "Security" and "Long-term" support levels, only the "Extended Long-Term Support" is available until 30 June 2022.
Can we either use some project config to substitute the package? Or do we have to introduce a custom empty dh-systemd transitional package for those new distributions?
We could adjust debian/control to depend on dh-systemd unless debhelper (>= 9.20160709) as done here.
However, as I'm looking into it... the dh-systemd dependency doesn't appear to be necessary in the first place. We don't use it in most Osmocom packages. The package provides dh_systemd_start and dh_systemd_enable, which could be used to start/enable systemd services. But we don't use these, from git blame it seems that the dh-systemd dependency was only added as copy-paste from other debian/control files or because it appeared to be needed to install systemd services.
So I'll make patches to remove the dh-systemd dependency from debian/control.
