Re: DEP 17: Improve support for directory aliasing in dpkg
Hi,
On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 11:57:58AM +0000, Holger Levsen wrote:
> Constitution 2.1.1 is great, however we don't really have a mechanism how to
> deal with people flat out ignoring Constitution 6 aka the tech-ctte and doubting
> and activly working against it's decisions.
We have: we can find a new maintainer and transfer the package. For that
to happen, someone would have to step up and volunteer to either develop
the necessary functionality, or accept a patch that does so, and then
continue as maintainer.
This has not happened.
I also doubt it will happen, because anyone capable of maintaining a
core system component such as dpkg is aware that nothing implemented so
far is of sufficient quality that they want to be responsible for its
continued maintenance.
The tech-ctte decision mainly adds an additional constraint on proposed
solutions: they may not require a temporary rollback (through
dpkg-usrunmess or similar), but must accept transitioned and half-
transitioned systems as they are, and bring them to a fully-transitioned
and consistent state. It's unclear if it also means that dpkg need not
provide a way to remove aliases.
This adds a moderate amount of additional complexity as we need to add
more checks to hot paths in dpkg, and we need to verify that these code
paths work. In my opinion, having these paths will add robustness to
dpkg, so we want them anyway, so this doesn't add further delay.
The core problem remains however: the tech-ctte decision has not made
code appear, and the Constitution is also powerless to do so.
Simon
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