There never should have been an NMU simply replacing rng-tools with
rng-tools5. I did not notice that this had happened.
On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 07:21:49PM +0100, Andreas Henriksson wrote:
That has apparently failed to materialize well in time for buster.
Looking at the contents of the binary packages it seems rng-tools
(in unstable) has more contents and likely provides more
functionality/integration (but I haven't looked into details, eg.
rng-tools5 has no /etc/default file which might be a good thing as those
are generally frowed upon in the current systemd service age, but has
there been any work on actual migration of current rng-tools users
configuration to what rng-tools5 uses?)
It's not possible to migrate people from rng-tools to rng-tools5 as the
functionality does not entirely overlap. There's no meaningful
conversion from one to the other, nor does there need to be. (A user
currently running rng-tools has no need to move to rng-tools5.) There's
a chance (though increasingly small as the legacy hardware ages) that
forcing a migration from rng-tools to rng-tools5 will break an existing
setup.
The intent of transitioning was entirely to make it easier for people
reading non-debian-specific instructions on the internet telling them to
install "rng-tools" in order to get certain functionality (specifically
RDRAND/RDSEED) would get the package they were expecting. The end result
for buster would be rng-tools2 and rng-tools5 packages, with an
rng-tools package pulling in rng-tools2 as a replacement.
Given that the kernel seems to be moving in the direction of allowing
RDRAND/RDSEED to seed /dev/random without blocking (see
RANDOM_TRUST_CPU) I'm not sure a package renaming dance is worthwhile as
the most common reason for installing rng-tools5 will no longer be
as relevant.
Another option is to simply remove rng-tools, which eliminates the
confusion. But, doing that will mean dropping support for certain
(legacy) configurations supported in the current rng-tools package but
not rng-tools5.
