Bug#282283: Splitting dselect from dpkg -- acceptable plan?

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi Nathanael,

On Mon, 2007-04-16 at 13:49:32 -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> OK.  So I managed to construct a dselect source package which builds
> independently of dpkg.  It required duplicating substantial portions of
> lib/ .  I intend that to be temporary.  Until those portions are gone,
> I will keep an eye on any changes made to lib/ in dpkg.

I'd like to avoid this situation.

> My plan for dselect is to make dselect more fully based on apt, which 
> should incidentally allow the removal/replacement of much of that code; 
> but to add the build-deps needed, dselect has to become an independent 
> package *first*.

Ian commented on that one already, as I'm not an active user of dselect
I don't have any actual say, only on the interfaces that dselect is
using from dpkg.

> Is this an acceptable future path for dselect?  Is the temporary forking 
> of libdpkg considered acceptable? (One alternative is to make a real,
> shared libdpkg, but looking at it I don't really think that's a good 
> idea.)

My plan was to start cleaning up libdpkg incrementally, and start
exporting few versioned symbols at a time, for example starting with
dpkg_compare_versions or similar obvious ones. I think this is a
realistic approach, instead of hoping that one day we suddenly get a
completely cleaned up library.

> If this is an acceptable transition path, I will polish up the new 
> dselect package (initially with no significant code differences) and we 
> can arrange for an appropriately coordinated upload; from then on 
> dselect and dpkg can evolve separately.
> 
> Let me know.  Replies to bug trail and/or list please.

As I've said I don't really use dselect, mostly when testing new code
changes, although I've been fixing few dselect issues as well. You
were complaining about it's state, and it's true that it might not see
completely new development but at least as long as it's part of dpkg
I'll keep maintaining it, and if people send patches and they are fine
they'll get applied.

My other concern is related with this last point, I've not noticed
patches or work in general from you for dselect (I might have just
very well missed it!), I'd be hesitant to give it to someone who has
not shown yet a commitment for the task, though.

For example Bruce Sass has been doing quite some triagging on the bug
reports.

thanks,
guillem