Michael Stone dixit:
> 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?
No, no, no, of course not. I’m talking about sid (and therefore testing).
Even before the release of buster, rng-tools in sid was 5 already and
therefore unusable. It simply did not migrate in time for buster,
thankfully, but the presence of rng-tools-debian would have helped,
even so, to alleviate that.
> 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.
It was never reverted. By current migration rules, rng-tools 2.x would
even have been removed from testing prior to the release because the
then-5.x in unstable did not migrate to testing for long.
> And into that you uploaded *another copy* of rng-tools.
Yes, after both getting a suggestion to do so (via Launchpad) from
one of the developers involved *and* running into the problem that
rng-tools (in sid) was version 5 and that not getting fixed.
> 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.
Upstream expressed an interest of migrating existing users of rng-tools
to rng-tools5 if at all possible so the rng-tools5 maintainers are
invited to transition like that.
> I still believe that rng-tools-debian is a terrible name because it
Yes. If these concerns were raised in time, we could have easily
renamed it before the buster release. (The package was already in
existence for some time because *buntu had the 5 versions much
earlier, but I’d have ignored that and dealt with it.)
Back then, 5 was the *buntu version and 2 the Debian version,
so the naming was somewhat caused from that.
> 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
I’ve long added this to the package description:
This is an unofficial version of rng-tools which has been extensively
modified to add multithreading and a lot of new functionality. However,
most users of newer or high-bandwidth HWRNGs might wish to install the
5.x version of rng-tools, also packaged as rng-tools5, instead; while
it lacks some of the new functionality from this version, it offers
more performant support for those.
The package is also “native” now, so it’s kinda “the one that contains
tons of changes developed during Debian packaging historically”. Let’s
take this as naming reason, because changing the name _now_ is going
to be more hassle than it is worth and with the package descriptions in
both packages adjusted suitably, users will be made aware of it.
(Changes to the rng-tools-debian description to express this more
clearly and in a more native English language are, of course, very
welcome. Just drop me an eMail.)
> come up with a better name. rng-tools-legacy makes more sense, or you could
It would have made more sense, but we’re past release now, so…
> rng-tools-debian because you really want to please at least take care of
> cleaning up the rng-tools transition.
I could take over rng-tools and transition them to rng-tools-debian,
but this isn’t desired in most cases, so this is really between the
maintainers of rng-tools and rng-tools5 in my eyes.
bye,
//mirabilos
--
“Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having
a peeing section in a swimming pool.”
-- Edward Burr
