[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Bug#945542: debcargo -- Randomly adds and removes binary packages

[Bastian Blank]

Hi Ximin

On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 10:25:51PM +0000, Ximin Luo wrote:
> Control: severity -1 normal

Please stop fiddling with severities.

> The more precise reason, as I have explained many times already, is because the cargo package manager supports crates having optional dependencies. It is not feasible to automatically merge optional-dependency-sets together because it results in dependency loops that would not otherwise exist. It is not economically feasible to manually merge these sets together either, because it is boring and time-consuming work, error-prone (hard to manually tell if you did or did not introduce a cycle) and of questionable benefit.

Yes, I got that.  And it seems cargo does not support recursive
dependencies.

However Debian does not use cargo, it uses dpkg and apt.  apt and dpkg
actually support recursive dependencies.  Due to some downsides in
regards of the handling of maintainer scripts they are discuraged.  But
as long as you don't have any of those, which all those packages don't
have, that's not much of a problem.

> I do not see any users complaining about this behaviour of our automatic tooling. We would be happy to work towards a patch on any Debian infrastructure to make these processes smoother. There is no reason why adding and removing empty metadata-only packages should require manual oversight, and if one is (and one should be) interested in automating the amount of manual work involved in maintaining Debian infrastructure, this is one obvious tedious task to automate away.

Sylvestre as rust team member asked the ftp team, which is responsible
for the archive content, to change their handling of binary-NEW.  So you
expect the ftp team to do the work you don't want to do.

This bug is about members of the ftp team asking you to change your
solution to that problem.  Re-iterating why it's not possible does not
help.

> We are all volunteers, there is no "job security" here, why are we manually reviewing empty packages and we are we trying to conserve a process that involves manually reviewing empty packages?

Because the ftp team is responsible for the content of the archive,
including package names etc.

Regards,
Bastian

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