Bug#833459: RFS: primesieve/5.7.0+ds-1 -- fast prime number generator C/C++ library

[Gianfranco Costamagna <locutusofborg@debian.org>]

Hi,

>The description specially ask NOT to attempt to "fix" this.



This is something that the maintainer should be aware of, even if
there is no fix.
The point is that the maintainer is expected to be able to read the tag
and know the possible issues by this warning
>I see that this tag draws too much attention, so the next version of 
>Lintian will not emit it (unless you figure out how to re-enable it).


I think this is an issue, and should be emitted by lintian.
There is no fix right now, and this is true, but it doesn't make it
"less important" to me

>But wait... Why -dev and -dev-common are separate packages in the first 
>place? They are both tiny.


probably the rationale was "multiarch" but now the package seems multiarch-ok,
so merging them seems a good thing to do, you are right :)


>>versioned dev libraries makes me sad, really sad.>
>SONAME bump was an excellent opportunity to fix this.
>
>Now that you sponsored the package, you can only blame yourself for the 
>sadness. :>


lol :-)

while it is true in general, there are specific use cases to have a versioned -dev package.
I don't see any rdep in Debian archive, so probably people are using them with self-compiled
packages, and in this case having different -dev packages coinstallable can be a good thing to do.



as a libpng maintainer, I got bored of fixing the libpng12-dev hardcoded dependencies, and I/we ended
up in removing it at the end (probably making the next transition painful).
But when no rdeps are in Debian, I really don't care too much about it.

thanks for the valuable input as usual!
I leave the maintainer to answer to the questions,

Gianfranco