Bug#535645: Wrongfull removal of ia32-libs-tools
Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> writes:
> So far I have only seen one reason stated clearly: Might hinder
> transition to multiarch. I think I have shown how I intend to handle
> that transition in ia32-libs-tools whenever and however Debian will do
> it. So far nobody has pointed out flaws in that plan.
Personally, the main thing that makes me uncomfortable with the
ia32-libs-tools approach from a design perspective is that it's
manipulating data that previously in Debian we've assumed is invarient.
In this thread some of the ideas discussed have involved rewriting the
Packages file so that uses via a different tool see different package
metadata, and creating Debian packages via a somewhat-official tool from
the main archive that do not appear in any of our package tracking systems
but which users may perceive as being part of Debian.
Even apart from the question of what specific problems people can
anticipate in advance and what solutions we can find for those problems,
both of those strike me as bad architectural approaches because they break
assumptions that users and software make about the data consistency of
Debian as a whole. They're the kind of decisions that have a tendency to
cause unexpected and unanticipated problems in the future.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: