[Pkg-matrix-maintainers] Bug#926668: nheko: mtxclient is missing from debian/control output

[Linda Lapinlampi]

Source: nheko
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

according to the `debian/README.sources` file (see Bug#926659), the
sources of mtxclient are included with nheko's source in Debian. The
source package doesn't declare to build a mtxclient package in
debian/control.

What I wanted to do was make an UNRELEASED package for nheko 0.6.3, with
a more up-to-date mtxclient dependency (to resolve a bug causing
nheko 0.6.3 to crash with Matrix v3 rooms). This dependency does not
exist in the Debian tree by itself, but is static-linked with nheko
Reborn.

What I found was this convoluted and antiqued Standards-Version
packaging, which requires running debian/rules make-orig-source and
fetching sources from out of the tree. The CMake rules for this project
would seem to otherwise download source tarballs from the Internet
during the build process.

I would also believe mtxclient would be more useful as a standalone
package, and the nheko package in Debian should be patched to
dynamically link to it, but that's maybe off-topic for this issue.

Despite Debian Policy 4.3.0.3 § 4.13 on convenience copies saying it's a
"should" and not a "must" to not use the convenience copies, but please
consider if this makes the package unsuitable for release in buster
(severity serious).

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

-- no debconf information