Bug#650132: hint: binary to source mapping has unhelpful side-effects
Package: release.debian.org
User: release.debian.org@packages.debian.org
Usertags: tools
hint's automagic binary to source mapping has unintended and undesired
side-effects in some circumstances. The situation where issues have
been noticed most is with "hint clean" and renamed source packages, but
it will likely manifest in other cases.
By way of an example, assume that the source package "libfoo-ruby"
previously produced a binary of the same name. The binary package is
now produced by "ruby-foo", so a remove hint is added for the old source
package.
On the clean run after the libfoo-ruby source is removed, hint will read
the remove hint and attempt to update the versions. Noticing that there
is no libfoo-ruby source package in testing, it will try using a binary
package of that name and then successfully map it back to ruby-foo.
Rather than moving the remove hint below the "finished" marker, the end
result is instead that the hints file contains a remove hint for the
_new_ source package, ruby-foo.
I haven't found an easy way of resolving this yet, so am filing this in
the BTS so that the issue is documented and in case anyone else has any
thoughts.
Adam
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