Re: Upcoming Section changes in the archive (deborphan)
On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 01:03:39PM +0100, Enrico Zini wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 10:03:55PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > There are tools that understand the special meaning of the 'oldlibs'
> > section and treat it specially; at least deborphan comes to mind,
> > there may be others. I don't see the necessity for such a section
> > rename,
Actually he also talks about adding deprecated non-library packages, so
this is more than just a "section rename".
> > but if it happens I think it needs to be announced in advance and
> > coordinated.
Per default deborphan assumes that libraries are in libs or oldlibs.
This is necessary to find orphaned libraries but prevent packages like
libpam* or libapache* to be displayed as orphans. The upcoming section
changes will break this assumption and thus there will be many false
negatives (orphaned libraries that are not found anymore) until large
parts of deborphan have been adapted or rewritten.
In comparison to the other proposed changes the removal of oldlibs is
only a minor issue for deborphan. With my deborphan upstream/maintainer
hat on: Given that no non-library packages will be added to oldlibs,
and this change happens at the same time as the other section changes,
the removal of oldlibs is ok for me and I do not feel the need to
further coordinate this. Additionally no non-library packages must be
added to libs or libdevel at any time, I guess nobody had such plans
anyway.
> It shouldn't be anything harder than adding 'deprecated'
> (non-library, deprecated software) to complement oldlibs,
Adding non-library packages to oldlibs would cause these to be handled
like a library by deborphan and thus possibly being falsely displayed as
orphaned libraries. Since people tend to run aptitude purge `deborphan`
in loops [1] or use similar constructs I saw in the past this would lead
to unintended package removals.
> ask tools to treat them equally,
The two sections are not exactly equal and handling them equal would be
wrong (see above).
> and when we're satisfied that they do, just get rid of oldlibs.
No, deborphan will be adapted after all section related changes in the
archive are done. Ad interim, conservative defaults and algorithms in
deborphan ensure that additional or missing sections do not cause false
positives.
Deborphan will support both section layouts until the next change
related to sections happens, at least unless the new section layout will
be messed up in a, from the viewpoint of deborphan, non-backwards
compatible way.
Regards
Carsten
[1] http://debaday.debian.net/2007/10/21/deborphan-find-packages-you-dont-want/
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