[Piuparts-devel] Mass bug filing for shared library broken symlinks detected by piuparts

[Ian Jackson]

> Shortly, piuparts.debian.org will be elevating the broken symlink test
> in sid from a warning to an error status. In advance of that, bugs
> submissions are planned against packages which are responsible for
> such links.

I don't think this is a good idea.

>     These are sometimes triggered because a Recommended or reverse
>     dependency package owning the symlink target file is not yet
>     installed. This type of failure mode needs to be eliminated so
>     that other symlink problems become more visible. In this case,
>     the problem can be resolved by creating a trigger for the
>     target file. See the dpkg triggers documentation[1] and example
>     on the net[2] for implementation details.

I think this should be dealt with by making the diagnosis more
sophisticated, not by introducing substantial additional complexity
into packages.  Alternatively, you should implement an override
facility.

There is IMO nothing wrong with package X containing a symlink to a
file present in Y, if there is some plausible explanation and the
broken link doesn't cause harmful behaviour on the user's system.

If X recommends (or even suggests) Y this probably means that there is
such an explanation, but it seems to me that this situation might
occur even if there is no declared relationship between X and Y (for
example, one of the packages might contain a plugin for the other,
implemented by dropping a symlink into an appropriate directory).

Ian.