On Thu, Oct 01, 2020 at 05:28:12PM +0000, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
Michael Stone dixit:
So you could have added whatever you needed to rng-tools and skipped the
unnecessary package...
No, rng-tools is a completely different software.
So your position is that rng-tools 2-unofficial-mt.14-1+b2 and
rng-tools-debian 2-unofficial-mt.14-3 both in buster are completely
different codebases?
Let's review again.
Prior to buster there was rng-tools. It's a legacy codebase that's
diverged from basically every other distribution. There was also
rng-tools5 which was the then-current upstream which provided new
functionality and is frankly more useful on modern hardware, but which
did not (and probably never will) support the legacy hardware.
I had discussed with the (past) rng-tools maintainer the possibility of
renaming that to something like rng-tools-legacy with a transition
package, with the intent of freeing up the rng-tools package name in the
short term and possibly renaming rng-tools5 in the long term.
All well and good, stretch was released with rng-tools (legacy) and
rng-tools5.
Then someone decided to NMU rng-tools with a patch to basically make it
a copy of rng-tools5. That never made it to release, and buster was
released with both rng-tools (legacy) and rng-tools5.
And into that you uploaded *another copy* of rng-tools. So now we have
two versions of rng-tools (legacy), one copy of rng-tools5, and a zombie
NMU of rng-tools5 called rng-tools in unstable that's been removed from
testing so that testing currently has no rng-tools.
So anybody using rng-tools in buster will end up with an orphaned
package in the next release. There's another version of the same code
*but with no transition mechanism* called rng-tools-debian. And there's
another package called rng-tools5, originally intended as a bridge to a
new package structure, and which is now awkwardly named as the upstream
codebase is now up to version 6.
Ideally you would come up with a transition mechanism to move rng-tools
users to some other package name because you are the one who has laid
claim to that codebase. I still believe that rng-tools-debian is a
terrible name because it is not sponsored by the debian project and
because the name does not give any hints to users about why they might
want to use the package. If anything it misleads them into thinking that
they should choose the old code if they're running debian when
realistically that is almost certainly not the case. As long as
transition packages are being discussed it seems like an ideal time to
come up with a better name. rng-tools-legacy makes more sense, or you
could come up with something better, or if you insist on calling it
rng-tools-debian because you really want to please at least take care of
cleaning up the rng-tools transition. Once rng-tools in debian stable is
migrated to the new package name (with a transition package that goes
away) then we'll finally have something sane that supports the users in
a reasonable fashion and we'll have a way forward in the future.
