[pkg-cryptsetup-devel] Bug#981405: Bug#981405: man crypttab file conflict with systemd

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

Am 23. September 2022 16:06:25 MESZ schrieb Luca Boccassi <bluca at debian.org>:
>On Fri, 2022-09-23 at 15:50 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
>The problem is, what's upstream and what's not.

Well, at least systemd certainly is not. It merely integrates cryptsetup.
*If* there's any upstream at all,  it's cryptsetup,  which already contains the manpage, and added its distro-specific extensions on documentation to it.
Since it even contains information about differences with systemd, it seems quite fine to me. 

> Everywhere else, the
>crypttab manpage shows something completely different from what it does
>on Debian. And that's a problem, it doesn't make the situation better
>but just adds confusion.
>If upstream cryptsetup shipped it, then you'd have been right, but it
>does not.

Well, Debian ain't everywhere else... and Debian users likely want the information that's most relevant to them, which for cryptsetup seems to be is extensions... at least for the foreseeable future.



>We no longer live in a world where each distro is a world in its own,
>completely insulated from everything else, and that's a good thing
>IMHO.

Sure, but still, distros are different and that's a good thing - otherwise we could just merge Debian into Feddebarchsuse.


> Also, information is not siloed either - if you google
>'crypttab', it's the upstream's systemd manpage that comes up.

Well but mere popularity in Google surely cannot be what decides.
What if Apple made some FLOSS cryptowallet software and calls its config crypttab. And when so and so many people use that, the cryptsetup manpage has to go away?
Or if other distris all use the name apt for something else... than Debian's APT manpage needs to rename?
That alone isn't a criteria which is in the sense of Debian users. 

I can understand if one wants to rename pre- existing stuff, like was done with chromium bsu package because that's far less important than the browser, but here? 

Cryptsetup's crypttab seems more close to what could be called upstream. It's well maintained, it's most likely much more used (in Debian and all derivatives) and it was there first. 

>If the
>Debian-specific one had a Debian-specific name, it would (should?) come
>up first when searched for specifically.

The "Debian-specific" isn't more or less specific than systemd's.

But apart from that, for that we have manpage in the system as well as a Debian manpage website.
If people take their documentation from just somewhere,  no one really can complain.
And IMO that's well established practise, since we have *many* manpage names which have different content.... just consider any C/POSIX library call, which may greatly differ from Linux with oder UNIXes.

Confusion would actually much bigger,  if the one from systemd would be taken as the "main" one,  cause I guess, unlike Debian's, it wouldn't get any pointers that things are incompatible with Debian - at least not in the upstream version (which again people might find on the Web,  even if they actually use Debian's cryptsetup).

Cheers, 
Chris