Hi Stephen, Thank you for not dropping the ball after my initial "it's not that easy" reply.
On Sat, May 09, 2020 at 10:53:10AM +0200, Stephen Kitt wrote: > There’s another part of the transition which bothers me: if we add memusage > to a package which is depended upon (albeit temporarily) by libc-dev-bin, it > becomes part of build-essential, and adding memusage means adding libgd3, > libfontconfig1, libfreetype6, etc. to all builds... > > It occurred to me that there is however a way to add memusage while > transitioning cleanly, over a few years. It seems to me that the binaries in > libc-dev-bin can be split into two categories: binaries that are expected as > build tools (gencat and rpcgen), and binaries that are useful as tools for > understanding programs but not building them (memusage, memusagestat, mtrace, > sotruss, sprof). How about the following? > > * We add a new package, say libc-devtools, containing the second type of > tools (mtrace, sotruss, sprof). For transition purposes, libc-dev-bin > depends on that in Bullseye. > * We add another package, memusage, containing memusage and memusagestat. > That’s the package which ends up with all the annoying extra dependencies, > but nothing depends on it. > * In Bookworm, libc-dev-bin can drop the dependency on libc-devtools, and we > can merge memusage into libc-devtools. > > Does that make sense? All of what you write here makes very much sense to me and the trade-offs seem good to me. What you propose will result in making the bootstrapping/profile stuff simpler/better. That said, I am not a glibc maintainer. I don't see the full picture. I have two minor remarks: * Should libc-devtools maybe recommend memusage already? * We cannot simply have libc-devtools absorb memusage in bookworm. Doing so would break upgrades when someone has memusage, but not libc-devtools installed. Therefore memusage likely needs to be a transitional dummy package in bookworm and can only be removed one release later. I'm wondering whether this could be avoided if we had memusage depend on libc-devtools. Neither of these touch the core of your thoughts. I'm happy to review patches to make this happen. Please continue to Cc me if you want my review. Helmut
