Bug#575059: Should Package-Type be included in udebs or not?
Hi Russ,
On Tue, 23 Mar 2010, Russ Allbery wrote:
> On the Lintian side, I saw the patch come in from someone who's actively
> working on udebs, checked the history cited in the patch, saw that it was
> requested by Frans Pop, and considered that a fairly authoritative source
> for what d-i wants.
Cyril pointed out that Frans indicated him the situation but he didn't
forward this information in the bug report (he received it afterwards
probably):
http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2010/03/msg00190.html
> There seems to be a lot of bikeshed painting going on there. While I'm
> sympathetic to Guillem's desire to generalize, given that the d-i team
> owns the bikeshed in question, I'd personally be inclined to let them
> paint it whatever color they want.
I really don't care much on the issue either, I understand the reasoning
of both sides. I just want to have some decision taken so that we can all
go forward and use official names everywhere instead of having to use
kludges (yes XC-Package-Type is a kludge, it pollutes the changes file
with a field that has nothing to do there).
> > Hence I'm seeking advice from the technical committee. In the mean time,
> > I think this warning should not be kept in lintian.
>
> As a Lintian maintainer, I'm not (yet) seeing a good reason to remove it.
It generates false positives on udebs which have already been converted to
use the official name:
libdirectfb-1.2-0-udeb
libdirectfb-bin-udeb
fbset-udeb
gnumach-udeb
libaio1-udeb
libbsd0-udeb
For me those packages are not buggy, either dpkg is buggy for embeding the
field when it should not or some other tools are buggy because they should
not continue to blindly forward the Package-Type field (in status, in
Packages files, etc.).
Note: we could decide that embeding is the right upstream choice but
that in Debian we want to drop it (thanks to vendor hooks in the
dpkg-gencontrol code, that could be done, I'm not sure it makes much sense
however).
> Note that other parts of Lintian already expect XC-Package-Type and don't
> recognize Package-Type, so it's the path of least resistance in Lintian to
> keep it as-is, although we also could fix that depending on the results of
> this discussion. Currently, XC-Package-Type seems to be the way that this
> is done, so at the least Lintian is currently requesting consistency. In
> the face of debate, consistency is always a good default position.
I would suggest to fix lintian to accept all variants just like
dpkg-gencontrol/dpkg-genchanges do and just like debhelper does.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Like what I do? Sponsor me: http://ouaza.com/wp/2010/01/05/5-years-of-freexian/
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