[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Bug#942487: Bug#942487: Bug#942487: Bug#942487: rust-web-sys: Provides header is more than 256K long and it breaks reprepro...

[Ximin Luo]

Ansgar:
> Ximin Luo writes:
>> Raphael Hertzog:
>>> Don't abuse the "Provides" field when you have such a volume of
>>> interfaces to document.
>>
>> Can you please explain why 256 KB provides field is "abuse"?
> 
> The Packages index is a shared resource by all packages and every Debian
> user has to download and process the full packages index; adding
> excessive amounts of data should therefore be avoided.  (The 256 KB
> added to the Packages index are larger than the entire source
> (compressed) source package...)
> 

Only a few (<10) packages out of 600+ rust packages have very large Provides fields. The main Debian tools are coping with it fine. It's one derivative unofficial tool that's unable to cope.

I don't see why we should introduce artificial limits (and increase workload) in order to cater to one old tool.

>> Do you have some concrete suggestions on how to improve the tool to
>> reduce this "abuse"?
> 
> Don't generate virtual packages (Provides) for every feature; don't
> generate four virtual packages for every feature.
> 

Simply "not doing this" quite literally will break everything in the Debian Rust ecosystem of packages, and is quite directly analogous to asking dpkg to "ignore all Provides". Several alternatives were explored in the past and the current option was settled upon in #901827.

X

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