Control: tags -1 - moreinfo
On 2023-03-12 14:44 +0000, Holger Levsen wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 12, 2023 at 03:36:33PM +0100, Sven Joachim wrote:
>> After taking a closer look, this seems to be all red herring. Sbuild
>> uses apt for resolving the build dependencies, and while apt prefers
>> virtual packages over real ones, it has no problem to use the virtual
>> one (libncurses-dev in this case) in case the real one is uninstallable
>> or insufficient.
>>
>> I guess I'll drop the transitional packages in an upload to experimental
>> and see what happens with the pseudo-excuses[1].
>
> cool!
Everything went well, and the transitional packages are no longer in
testing. :-)
>> Filing bugs against reverse (build-)dependencies would be doable for
>> libtinfo-dev, but for libncursesw5-dev (#1032740) and libncurses5-dev
>> (for which you did not file a bug, for whatever reason) this is a
>
> I did: #1032741
Err, of course. Somehow I managed to overlook that bug.
>> non-starter due to the large number of them.
>
> bug filing can be scripted ;)
Surely, but filing 300+ bugs to get rid of three empty packages is still
a very bad ratio and causes a lot of busy work which is not really
necessary. Rather, I filed _one_ bug against ftp.debian.org[1] to remove
the cruft packages from unstable where they currently remain.
FWIW, what I did looks like a good strategy for other transitional
packages with lots of reverse (build-)dependencies, maybe you would like
to inform their maintainers of it.
Cheers,
Sven
1. https://bugs.debian.org/1040983
