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

[Ian Jackson]

G. Branden Robinson writes ("Shouldn't shipping broken symlinks be against policy?"):
> Not reopening, but I have some questions for the Policy team.
...
> 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.

I don't think there is anything *inherently* wrong in shipping a
broken symlink.

But if a broken symlink causes some kind of malfunction then that
seems to be just a bug.  Not every bug is a bug because it contravenes
policy.  Some bugs are just bugs :-).

> 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.

I agree that this is untidy and undesirable.  I don't see any good
reason why one would want to do this rather than shipping the
rust-gdb.1.gz symlink in the same package as the thing it points to.

I guess the maintainer will also think this is a bug.  Did anyone
report it ?

Ian.