Re: iproute2: removing /sbin/ip link breaks other packages and possibly user scripts
On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 11:14:41PM +0530, Nilesh Patra wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 12:30:22PM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > At 2024-08-15T13:20:02-0400, Michael Stone wrote:
> > > It's just so depressing that this is how debian works now. We used to
> > > try to not break things, now the answer is "you should have read the
> > > NEWS, and known that unrelated packages were going to break, and
> > > reconfigured standard debian network tools to add non-default
> > > timeouts". All because the aesthetic preference for not having the
> > > same binary appear in two different paths is a higher priority than
> > > keeping systems working.
> >
> > "Move fast and break as much stuff as possible, or Debian will be doomed
> > to irrelevance. I'll be SABDFL someday!"
> >
> > The creed of the _impactful_ developer.
>
> It looks like a pretty pointless change - breaks several scripts for example.
> It was/is common to assume /sbin/ip to be present and usable.
> Michael's bug report does make sense to me. Such a change is even causing
> systems to not bootup.
On 2024-07-14 (five days before the iproute2 change was made), there was
this conversation on #debian-devel:
19:14 <petn-randall> Is there a reason why iproute2 ships a symlink
from /sbin/ip to /bin/ip? I've looked into the packaging repo and it
seems to predate the git log.
...
19:52 <cjwatson> petn-randall:
https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=%2Fsbin%2Fip%5Cb&literal=0 has
a pretty non-trivial list of things that would need fixed before
removing that (and of course some false positives)
I realize it wasn't petn-randall who made this change, but it seems a
big coincidence that the symlink was dropped a few days after this IRC
conversation; and yet it seems nobody bothered to do the most basic due
diligence that I pointed out here, which is kind of sad. (I fixed
wireless-tools after this change caused an RC bug there.)
--
Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwatson@debian.org]
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