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Re: rng-tools5 vs rng-tools



On Thu, May 10, 2018 at 11:24:35AM +0200, Laurent Bigonville wrote:
Debian seems to contains to version of rng-tool packaged in two different src package (rng-tool, last upload in 2011 and rng-tool5, last upload yesterday).

This might be confusing for our users.

Shouldn't rng-tools package be removed and/or rng-tools5 renamed to rng-tools? Any reason to keep that old version in debian?

rng-tools5 doesn't support everything that's in rng-tools, so it isn't a direct replacement. The command line syntax changed, so existing configurations won't work. It would have been better if upstream had picked a different name for the new program, but without a time machine I can't fix that. :) As a practical matter, I would expect that the hardware supported only by the original package will eventually be obsolete to the point that debian won't run on it, at which point the distinction becomes moot. In theory someone could write a preinst that would check to see whether the current configuration is compatible, then set rng-tools5 to replace rng-tools but abort if it won't work--but as a practical matter, I would expect a large proportion of working rng-tools configurations to break trying to move them to rng-tools5, and for those that do work I wouldn't expect any benefits.

Yes, it's confusing, but I've tried to add keywords to the description to suggest that rng-tools5 is the one you want for newer hardware. (RDRAND/RDSEED)

Mike Stone


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