[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Bug#913572: Shouldn't shipping broken symlinks be against policy?

[G. Branden Robinson]

Not reopening, but I have some questions for the Policy team.

At 2018-11-13T16:26:00+0000, Ximin Luo wrote:
> Control: notfound -1 1.28.0+dfsg1-2
> 
> Closing, as far as I can tell it is not against Policy to ship a
> broken symlink,

I could have sworn you were incorrect, but sure enough, I read §10.5
carefully and grepped the rest of the policy manual and could find no
such prohibition.

It is certainly untidy.  So I ask the Policy team--_shouldn't_ it be
prohibited?

> if it doesn't affect the functionality of the package.

Well, when a package ships a man page, I expect something more
illuminating to happen than:

$ man rust-gdb
/usr/bin/man: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/rust-gdb.1.gz is a dangling symlink
No manual entry for rust-gdb
See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available.

> The man page is available in the rust-doc package which is already in
> Suggests.

In that case, isn't a better fix to put the symlink in that package,
too?

On my buster system, this is the only one of over 4,300 symlinks in
/usr/share/man that is broken:

$ find /usr/share/man -type l | wc -l; for F in $(find /usr/share/man \
-type l); do if ! test -f "$F"; then file "$F"; dpkg -S "$F"; fi; done
4938
/usr/share/man/man1/rust-gdb.1.gz: broken symbolic link to gdb.1.gz
rust-gdb: /usr/share/man/man1/rust-gdb.1.gz

> X
> 
> G. Branden Robinson:
> > Package: rust-gdb
> > Version: 1.28.0+dfsg1-2
> > Severity: normal
> > File: /usr/share/man/man1/rust-gdb.1.gz
> > 
> > $ dpkg -S /usr/share/man/man1/rust-gdb.1.gz
> > rust-gdb: /usr/share/man/man1/rust-gdb.1.gz
> > 
> > $ file /usr/share/man/man1/rust-gdb.1.gz
> > /usr/share/man/man1/rust-gdb.1.gz: broken symbolic link to gdb.1.gz
[snip]

Thanks for your time.  Policy mavens, please CC me or the bug on
replies; I don't subscribe to a billion lists like I did in the old
days.

Regards,
Branden
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