Control: user helm...@debian.org
Control: usertags -1 = dep17p9
Hi Dmitry and Chris,
On Mon, Nov 27, 2023 at 03:53:44PM +1100, Dmitry Smirnov wrote:
> On Monday, 27 November 2023 12:12:08 PM AEDT Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
> > Severity: important
> > ...
> > your package smartmontools ships an empty directory
> > /lib/systemd/system:
First of all, I confirm that there is a problem. Thanks for filing it.
What that problem is precisely, is less obvious. A naive lookup using
DEP17 would result in P6 (empty directory loss), but since smartmontools
also ships /usr/lib/systemd/system, it cannot actually be lost and hence
dumat does not complain about it. It is not a P6 problem.
However, base-files will eventually install /lib as a symbolic link in
its data.tar. When that happens, smartmontools has an undeclared symlink
vs directory conflict with base-files. In the worst scenario, this could
be resolved by dpkg in favour of smartmontools breaking the entire
system. I note that base-files does not yet have this symbolic link, so
what is being reported here is a future problem aiming to make the
transition less broken in future.
> How installing empty directory could possibly warrant severity "important"??
Thanks for asking. I am inclined to agree that filing P9 problems at
normal severity now and later bumping them to higher severity is more
appropriate given that there is little urgency just yet. This filing has
now become the first instance of a P9 problem being reported in Debian
as far as I understand. Chris has been doing a lot of work on important
aspects of this transition. Please expect us to not get every detail
right on the first attempts. Still your feedback is valuable for
improving future filings.
Thanks for your understanding
Helmut
