Hi Luca, On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 01:38:16AM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote: > On Wed, 12 Jul 2023 at 14:35, Helmut Grohne <hel...@subdivi.de> wrote: > > "risky" ones from becoming practically relevant). There is one kind of > > issue that may be actionable right now and that's the class of "empty > > directory" issues. If you notice that such an empty directory actually > > is not necessary (which probably is the case in the majority of cases), > > please go ahead and delete it from your package[2] or a file a bug with > > a patch. Also, please declare Conflicts or Replaces as usual as some > > forms of undeclared file conflicts also show up in the analysis. Another > > thing that helps now is cleaning up really old and unversioned Replaces > > as those may result in false negative detections. ... > > [2] List of packages that *may* be actionable: fwupd, gcc-snapshot, > > gretl, lib32lsan0, libjte-dev, libmpeg3-dev, libswe-dev, libx32lsan0, > > pcp, pkg-config, pkgconf, pkgconf-bin, python3-expeyes, systemd > > Does this mean I can nuke that empty directory from the systemd > package right now, without waiting for the rest of your proposal to be > implemented?
Thanks for asking. We have empty directories in binary packages in lots of cases. Some of them are there for some technical need. In other cases, the empty directory is a oversight and entirely unnecessary. I am fairly convinced that the lib*-dev packages shipping an empty /usr/lib/pkgconfig fall in that latter category and can delete their /usr/lib/pkgconfig at no loss of functionality. On the flip side, my understanding is that at least pkgconf and systemd ship their empty directories on purpose as intentional integration points and that these are not unused and should therefore not be deleted. So while dumat can tell whether a particular empty directory participates in a /usr-merge issue, it cannot tell you what the right action is. In some of the cases, the action is delete and that can happen at any time while in other cases the action is to protect them from accidental deletion, which is something we have to defer until there is consensus on the chosen mitigation. Helmut
