Re: Bug#697433: Is the Package-List field necessary for uploads ?
On Sat, 2013-01-12 at 09:07:19 +0000, Neil Williams wrote:
> On Sat, 12 Jan 2013 15:29:13 +0900
> Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> wrote:
> > By the way, isn't "Package-Type: udeb" completely redundant with "Section:
> > debian-installer" ?
>
> Different purposes.
Right. Where using Section in general should be considered fragile, we
switched away from it for base for a reason too.
> udeb is a file format, allowed to break ftp-master checks which would
> reject a deb from the same upload. Section, if it's anything at all
> nowadays, is an arbitrary label within the generated Packages file. The
> Package-Type field determines that file format when dpkg-deb builds the
> file, so is far more important than Section.
Unfortunately that's not true, as Package-Type does not get exported
to the binary package control file. See #452273 and #575059 for a
longish and painful discussion of the issue. I guess dak uses some
kind of heuristic to catalogue them.
> If anything is redundant, it's Section - and not just when it is set
> to debian-installer, every where. (If we finally decide to drop
> Section, can we also merge Priority: extra and Priority: optional too?
> That would be saying goodbye to a raft of override bugs / checks).
Now that you mention this, it makes me think that switching from Section
to Package-Type, in addition to all other advantages I listed on those
bug reports, would actually reduce space at the same time (7 bytes).
Section: debian-installer
Package-Type: udeb
But then, I don't think I've got the motivation to try to properly
integrate udeb support in dpkg proper again, given the previous
experience...
Thanks,
Guillem
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