[Python-modules-team] Bug#913997: what is the current maintainer view on this ?

[Antonio Terceiro]

On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 08:05:31PM +0200, Paolo Greppi wrote:
> The issue has been raised again on the yarnpkg side:
> https://bugs.debian.org/940511
> 
> Antonio, what is your point of view ?
> Do you think we can fix this for the Bookworm release ?

I think that the people who created this problem in the first place
showed no empathy and were not flexible at all even after presented with
evidence that there were existing projects from before theirs that were
already using the yarn name.

I agree with the original maintainer that this namespace takeover
attempt feels like bullying. "Mine is bigger than yours" is not a good
argument for anything in Debian.

I have a lot of other priorities, and I only adopted cmdtest to keep
vmdb2 in testing since autopkgtest uses it for building vm images.  I
don't plan to spend a single minute of my time working towards changing
the status quo (with a caveat, see below).

Now, with that said, I understand that the current situation creates a
technical problem for a growing ecosystem in Debian. Unfortunately I
don't have any easy solution to propose.

I will not block technical work to solve this in the correct way, and as
gatekeeper that will need to be involved in a solution I will review and
apply patches that make sense.

Dropping the Provides: would be relatively easy.

Renaming the binary is harder, because there are at least two packages
that use yarn from cmdtest during the build: gitano and vmdb2. they
would need to be ported, and that's up to their maintainers and
upstreams, who I assume won't be happy about it.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/python-modules-team/attachments/20200603/2a916c24/attachment.sig>