Bug#1020387: dictionaries-common: Consensus regarding the packaging of the Qt WebEngine hunspell binary dictionaries

[Dmitry Shachnev]

Hi Andres!

On Mon, Dec 26, 2022 at 03:33:52PM -0500, Andres Salomon wrote:
> It's definitely feasible*. However, there's the question of whether we want
> other important packages depending on chromium.
> https://bugs.debian.org/1004441 shows that it's still an outstanding
> question whether chromium will even ship in bookworm. I now have Tim helping
> with packaging, which is wonderful and a huge help (thanks Tim!), but he
> doesn't have upload privs. If I were to get hit by a bus (or more likely,
> hit by 😱Responsibilities😱), he'd have to find someone else to sponsor his
> upload. Without his help, I'm not sure I'd want commit to the next 3 years
> of security support. So the question of other packages build-depending on
> convert_dict from chromium will involve the release team and what we decide
> to do for bookworm.

OK, it is a valid reason (although it's a bit weird that we can ship without
Chromium for security maintenance reasons, but at the same time ship with
Qt WebEngine which is usually not getting any security updates at all).

So, if the consensus is that we should ship convert-dict from the Qt side,
I propose to name the package and the executable in a generic way, without
the Qt word (e.g. /usr/bin/convert-dict). This way if the situation changes
in future, we will be able to transfer this binary package to the Chromium
team which is a better home for it.

Also, I am passing the ball to Patrick Franz, who is the Qt 6 maintainer
(unlike me, who mostly works on Qt 5). He may have his own objections, of
course.

If you agree with my naming suggestion, the needed thing will be to add a
symlink /usr/bin/convert-dict -> /usr/lib/qt6/libexec/qwebengine_convert_dict,
and then either rename qt6-webengine-dev-tools to convert-dict or make it
provide a virtual package (the latter won't require passing the NEW queue).

--
Dmitry Shachnev
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