On Thu 2020-03-12 23:21:29 +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> That would clearly work for your use case. Now I am not sure it won't
> break other things.
I'd like to know what it would break if it would break anything.
> I asked on IRC and so far only get the confirmation that the package
> shall not be renamed to libc6-dbgsym.
Thanks for the reportback. Is there some policy about what kinds of
package may be named *-dbgsym generally that renaming libc6-dbg would
violate? comparing the file lists and (lack of) maintscripts between
libc6-dbg and (as a random example) libglib2.0-0-dbgsym, they don't look
that different (libglib2.0-0-dbgsym ships a file in /usr/lib/debug/.dwz
while libc6-dbg does not, but i don't know that this is an important
difference).
Or is the reason that a rename would require updating the dependencies
of other existing packages? For runtime deps, there aren't many:
0 dkg@alice:~$ apt rdepends libc6-dbg
libc6-dbg
Reverse Depends:
Suggests: testdisk-dbg
Suggests: libxapian30-dbg
Depends: valgrind
Suggests: testdisk-dbg
Recommends: libntdb1-dbg
|Recommends: libgcj17-dbg
Suggests: ekiga-dbg
Depends: valgrind
Suggests: testdisk-dbg
Depends: valgrind
0 dkg@alice:~$
I'm not sure the quickest way to get a list of build-deps, sorry! It
does seem like a transitional package would be the standard way to solve
this problem, and not a huge pain to do. We've handled much worse
transitions.
Or is it because it's always been this way, and there's documentation
out there that might get out of date? The documentation would survive
with a transitional package for one release of debian anyway, and at
some point we need to prioritize consistency for new users over
stability of unmaintained documentation. if someone is reading a
4-year-old unmaintained tutorial on debugging in debian they're probably
not getting the most helpful information anyway.
Or is there some other reason?
I'm sorry to press on this, but "IRC says we shall not do this" sounds a
lot like what people accuse debian of in its worst moments -- reflexive
resistance to change, even when there's a well-motivated reason and a
transition plan available for a concrete improvement, even a minor one
like this. I'm really in the dark here. If there are other reasons,
i'd like to know them.
Thanks for all your work in maintaining such a critical part of debian!
Regards,
--dkg
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature