Hi maintainers of tcputils and libbpf-tools,
since tcputils came up today as candidate for the Bug of the Day[1] I
had a look into the bug which describes a conflict between the two
packages. Usually such a conflict triggers a discussion between the
maintainers to find some solution. To clarify my position as someone
who intents to salvage the package: I'd happily adapt to any suggestion
- as long as there are any suggestions to solve the issue. ;-)
For the moment I've created a **temporary** Git repository in the
Salvage team space[2]. I would love to move that repository in the
Salvage team to some other place (Debian/ ???) at your preference. It
was just convenient to do the work in Git and once a repository is
inside Debian/ its harder to move. So please let me know about your
preference.
Here is the solution which I see:
Keep the name tcpconnect for libbpf-tools since this is the actively
maintained code base and might get a wider user base. However, I do not
see any good reason to but that binary into /usr/sbin. What is the
rationale to have it only inside the path of root? This true for all
tools of libbpf-tools.
So in case you (the maintainers of libbpf-tools) agree with me to move
the tools to /usr/bin we would have a real file conflict and this bug
would become RC (instead of just normal since only confusing not
conflicting).
My suggestion for tcputils is:
1. Move all tools of the package physically to
/usr/lib/tcputils/bin
2. Symlink all other tools but tcpconnect to /usr/bin
3. ln -s /usr/lib/tcputils/bin/tcpconnect /usr/bin/tcputils_tcpconnect
4. Add debian/NEWS.Debian with the following text:
Due to a name conflict with /usr/bin/tcpconnect in the package
libbpf-tools this binary had to be renamed. So tcputils now
provides this executable under the name
/usr/bin/tcputils_tcpconnect
To remain compatible with local user scripts using the name
tcpconnect the real executable is provided under the PATH
/usr/lib/tcputils/bin/tcpconnect
So if you want to use tcpconnect with its original name just
do the following: Set the PATH variable like
export PATH=/usr/lib/tcputils/bin:$PATH
Please make sure you can't easily use tcpconnect from the
libbpf-tools without specfying its explicit path in case
you have a co-installation of libbpf-tools and tcputils
Do you have any other suggestion? Usually its a good idea to approach
upstream about those name conflicts. However tcputils upstream is
inactive since 25 years. So this task would be up to you (the
libbpf-tools maintainers).
Kind regards and thank you for your cooperation
Andreas.
[1]
https://salsa.debian.org/tille/tiny_qa_tools/-/wikis/Tiny-QA-tasks#bug-of-the-day
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/salvage-team/tcputils
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