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

[G. Branden Robinson]

At 2018-11-13T17:02:49+0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> 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.

I almost do. :-D

> 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.

No; he closed it, and cited Policy's lack of a prohibition of shipping
broken symlinks in support of the present arrangement.

> Did anyone report it ?

That would be me.

-- 
Regards,
Branden
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