Michael Stone dixit: > So your position is that rng-tools 2-unofficial-mt.14-1+b2 and > rng-tools-debian > 2-unofficial-mt.14-3 both in buster are completely different codebases?
No, no, no, of course not. I’m talking about sid (and therefore testing). Even before the release of buster, rng-tools in sid was 5 already and therefore unusable. It simply did not migrate in time for buster, thankfully, but the presence of rng-tools-debian would have helped, even so, to alleviate that. > Then someone decided to NMU rng-tools with a patch to basically make it a copy > of rng-tools5. That never made it to release, and buster was released with > both > rng-tools (legacy) and rng-tools5. It was never reverted. By current migration rules, rng-tools 2.x would even have been removed from testing prior to the release because the then-5.x in unstable did not migrate to testing for long. > And into that you uploaded *another copy* of rng-tools. Yes, after both getting a suggestion to do so (via Launchpad) from one of the developers involved *and* running into the problem that rng-tools (in sid) was version 5 and that not getting fixed. > Ideally you would come up with a transition mechanism to move rng-tools users > to some other package name because you are the one who has laid claim to that > codebase. Upstream expressed an interest of migrating existing users of rng-tools to rng-tools5 if at all possible so the rng-tools5 maintainers are invited to transition like that. > I still believe that rng-tools-debian is a terrible name because it Yes. If these concerns were raised in time, we could have easily renamed it before the buster release. (The package was already in existence for some time because *buntu had the 5 versions much earlier, but I’d have ignored that and dealt with it.) Back then, 5 was the *buntu version and 2 the Debian version, so the naming was somewhat caused from that. > is not sponsored by the debian project and because the name does not give any > hints to users about why they might want to use the package. If anything it I’ve long added this to the package description: This is an unofficial version of rng-tools which has been extensively modified to add multithreading and a lot of new functionality. However, most users of newer or high-bandwidth HWRNGs might wish to install the 5.x version of rng-tools, also packaged as rng-tools5, instead; while it lacks some of the new functionality from this version, it offers more performant support for those. The package is also “native” now, so it’s kinda “the one that contains tons of changes developed during Debian packaging historically”. Let’s take this as naming reason, because changing the name _now_ is going to be more hassle than it is worth and with the package descriptions in both packages adjusted suitably, users will be made aware of it. (Changes to the rng-tools-debian description to express this more clearly and in a more native English language are, of course, very welcome. Just drop me an eMail.) > come up with a better name. rng-tools-legacy makes more sense, or you could It would have made more sense, but we’re past release now, so… > rng-tools-debian because you really want to please at least take care of > cleaning up the rng-tools transition. I could take over rng-tools and transition them to rng-tools-debian, but this isn’t desired in most cases, so this is really between the maintainers of rng-tools and rng-tools5 in my eyes. bye, //mirabilos -- “Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.” -- Edward Burr