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

[Sven Joachim]

On 2013-06-30 19:08 +0200, Julien Cristau wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 30, 2013 at 11:30:39 -0400, Dave Steele wrote:
>
>> 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.
>> 
>> This message covers the bug filings at the 'serious' severity due to a
>> Policy violation involving shared libraries. Section 8 states
>> "Packages containing shared libraries must be constructed with a
>> little care to make sure that the shared library is always available".
>> 
>> Discussion about bug filings at other severities may be handled in
>> separate threads.
>> 
>> The package list was generated by running an instance of
>> piuparts-slave/piuparts-master against sid, with the option
>> "--fail-on-broken-symlinks" enabled. The resulting list was
>> hand-massaged to eliminate a few packages which failed through the
>> fault of a dependency. These 'serious' bug candidates were identified
>> by testing the symlinks and targets against the regular expression
>> "/usr/lib/.*lib.*so".
>> 
>> There are 82 binary packages in this list, represented by 66 source
>> packages and 53 maintainers. This is about a quarter of all of the
>> packages reporting broken symlinks. A total of 279 broken symlinks are
>> being flagged as 'serious' due to shared library issues.
>> 
> AFAIK most of these get fixed up by ldconfig, which means they're not a
> problem in practice.  I don't think "serious" is the right severity
> unless there's real world consequences to the broken symlinks.

A cursory glance shows that many cases are a problem of missing
dependencies in the -dev package, and that is usually a serious problem
(e.g., binaries get linked statically).

Cheers,
       Sven