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

Angus Lees gus at debian.org
Wed Nov 14 08:07:35 GMT 2018


I think I am responsible for this dangling symlink :)

The issue is that the symlink target is _not_ in the 'rust-doc' package,
but in the 'gdb-doc' package which has nothing to do with the rust src
package, nor the rust maintainers.  Moving the rust-gdb symlink into
gdb-doc is not appropriate.

Background: rust-gdb is a tiny shell wrapper around gdb, that provides some
extra command line flags to set things up for debugging a rust program.  It
doesn't have a manpage upstream.  We could write one, but it would look
almost exactly like the gdb manpage since - again - just a wrapper.

So currently the rust-gdb package ships a rust-gdb.1.gz symlink that points
to gdb.1.gz (from the gdb-doc package).  Iirc, I originally created it as a
".so" stub troff file pointing to gdb.1, but some tool along the way
strongly suggested I replace that with the dangling symlink you see today.

Suggestions welcome - I imagine this is not a unique situation.  I think
our options are:
- no rust-gdb manpage at all
- a .so stub or symlink to gdb.1 (current situation)
- a manually-created stub manpage that just refers the reader to
gdb-doc/gdb.1
- (something else?)

I suspect you're going to choose that 3rd option, since it is the least
terrible and suggestions are almost free to make :)

NB: I'm ignoring the implied larger question of whether shipping broken
symlinks should or should not be against Debian policy.  I'll leave that
for the gallery to consider.

 - Gus
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