Re: Bug#301075: On #301075: bison and yacc alternatives
On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 09:14:11AM +0100, Michael Schmitz wrote:
> > > 2. If you think that bison should work even under this specific
> > > breakage (after all the byacc link is obviously stale), you need
> > > to fix dpkg instead of bison.
> I strongly doubt it's dpkg's fault. After all, handling compatibility
> problems of that sort is supposed to happen in postinst (which is what
> I suggested).
[I cc'ed the dpkg developers in hope of getting some opinions.]
If you think some package should take care of this problem, we need to
figure out what is the best place to fix this problem. I agree it is
not dpkg's fault, and I am only saying that the workaround should be in
dpkg instead of in bison postinst.
Correct me if I am wrong: the problem is caused by a dangling link in
the alternatives system that refers to an uninstalled package. dpkg
knows that byacc is not installed, so in principle update-alternatives
should be able to remove the invalid alternative all by itself.
Even if we fix the problem in bison properly (that means something other
than "update-alternatives --auto yacc"), the same issue will bite us
again when some other package forgets to remove alternatives on
uninstall. If we fix the problem in dpkg, we are not going to run into
the same issue again. That is why I think the fix (or rather, the
workaround) should be in dpkg instead in bison postinst.
> > > 1. Nothing needs to be done. We close the bug.
> > > 2. Something needs to be done. We assign this bug to dpkg.
> dpkg can't be expected to know everything of that sort. If the byacc
> breakage is a known problem you should account for it.
If byacc is not installed, then dpkg should be able to figure out that
the alternative is invalid. Furthermore there is no good way to fix the
issue in bison: "update-alternatives --auto yacc" overrides system admin
configuration and will annoy a whole bunch of other people.
How do you expect bison to "account for" the byacc breakage?
> Thanks for demonstrating the power of RC bugs in making life easier
> for us autobuild maintainers.
Wow, take it easy, man. There is no need to be sarcastic. We do want
to help make your life easy. But that does not mean we should go making
the wrong changes where they do not belong.
There are simpler ways to make your life easier. The fixed byacc is in
testing, and if you clean up any invalid byacc alternatives in the
chroot environments, they are not going to show up again. Much faster
than waiting for fixed bison/dpkg/whatever to enter testing.
--
Chuan-kai Lin
http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~cklin/
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