[Pkg-opencl-devel] Bug#1136116: this empty binary package needs a better description of why it exists

[John Scott]

Package: pocld
Version: 6.0-6
Severity: important

Hello,
On Trixie, I was interested in using pocld going off of the instructions here, because the concept of having remote computers work together at the OpenCL level seems pretty cool:
https://portablecl.org/docs/html/remote.html#xpointer(/html/body//section%5B@id=%22how-to-build%22%5D/child::*%5Bcontains(text(),%20%22server%20command%22)%20or%20preceding-sibling::p%5Bcontains(text(),%20%22server%20command%22)%5D%5D%5Bnot(position()%20%3E%202)%5D)

However, I'm really confused. The binary package says
Package: pocld
Version: 6.0-6
Description: dummy pocld for PoCL-R
 Dummy package, will contain pocld from PoCL 6.1.

Usually, for packages shipped in the archive, people understand a dummy package as having a dependency itself, migration script, or the like to serve some kind of minor function, but this binary package is literally empty and has no relationships with any other packages as far as I can tell. It has no reverse-dependencies or anything, so if there is some limitation that deters you from including a working PoCLd package in Debian... why not just omit it? There is no explanation in debian/changelog, no comments in debian/control or debian/rules, no README.source, no pertinent open bug... This boggles my mind.
In the absence of a more apparent reason, I'm concerned this looks like an attempt to circumvent rules around going through the NEW queue when adding a new binary package, by including a useless binary package that can have contents put in it later.

Also, PoCL 7.1 is in Debian Experimental, but despite being newer than 6.1, the binary package has the same description.

Please enlighten me about what's going on here.
Thank you

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 13.4
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 6.12.85+deb13-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled
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