I think I am responsible for this dangling symlink :)
The issue is that the symlink target is _not_ in the 'rust-doc' package, but in the 'gdb-doc' package which has nothing to do with the rust src package, nor the rust maintainers. Moving the rust-gdb symlink into gdb-doc is not appropriate.
Background: rust-gdb is a tiny shell wrapper around gdb, that provides some extra command line flags to set things up for debugging a rust program. It doesn't have a manpage upstream. We could write one, but it would look almost exactly like the gdb manpage since - again - just a wrapper.
So currently the rust-gdb package ships a rust-gdb.1.gz symlink that points to gdb.1.gz (from the gdb-doc package). Iirc, I originally created it as a ".so" stub troff file pointing to gdb.1, but some tool along the way strongly suggested I replace that with the dangling symlink you see today.
Suggestions welcome - I imagine this is not a unique situation. I think our options are:
- no rust-gdb manpage at all
- a .so stub or symlink to gdb.1 (current situation)
- a manually-created stub manpage that just refers the reader to gdb-doc/gdb.1
- (something else?)
I suspect you're going to choose that 3rd option, since it is the least terrible and suggestions are almost free to make :)
NB: I'm ignoring the implied larger question of whether shipping broken symlinks should or should not be against Debian policy. I'll leave that for the gallery to consider.
- Gus