[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Please provide a repo for packages not intent for users

[Shengjing Zhu]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 10:37 PM Ximin Luo <infinity0 at debian.org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 18 Jan 2020 10:25:36 +0800 Paul Wise <pabs at debian.org> wrote:
> > On Sat, 18 Jan 2020 00:31:11 +0800 Shengjing Zhu wrote:
> >
> > > There're a lot of packages in archive which users are not expected to
> > > install, for examples:
> > >
> > > * all golang-*-dev packages. (currently there are 1k+)
> > > * maybe[1] all librust-*-dev packages. (currently there also are 1k+)
> >
> > I think that these packages are solely a workaround for apt/dpkg not
> > supporting the ability to build-depend on and use (parts of) another
> > source package. I think that therefore we should enhance apt/dpkg and
> > remove all the golang/rust binary packages instead.
> >
>
> This doesn't work for Rust unfortunately, due to features. Based on which feature-set is activated, when you depend on a source-package you would want to pull in different sets of transitive dependencies.
>
> However, a combination of:
>
> 1. implicitly being able to install source packages into /usr/src
> 2. metadata-only binary Packages that can depend on these implicit source packages
>

This applies to Go too. Currently a source-package's build-depends
usually include those for testing purposes, which are not needed when
building the rdepends. Or we don't test it, or we have a separate
control-filed in source-package..

-- 
Shengjing Zhu