Julien Plissonneau Duquène:
(trimming the Cc: list a bit now that the announcements are done, last Cc: to #1091394, followup on debian-devel)Hi Helmut, Le 2025-01-16 10:18, Helmut Grohne a écrit :I'm attaching my proof of concept. Would you join forces and turn either of these PoCs into a proper Debian package that could be used during package builds? Once accepted, we may send patches to individual Debian packages making use of it and call OOM FTBFS a packaging bug eventually.I'm fine with that idea, and both PoCs use mostly the same logic (yours is a bit more advanced). Besides my personal distaste for Python ;) I implemented mine as a shell script so it can just be copied into packages for testing without introducing additional dependencies.Before introducing a whole new package for either of the candidates I would try to submit it to devscripts though, rereading the thread it seems that you didn't try that yet, and a Python implementation is probably better suited for there (larger pool of potential contributors, easier to implement testing etc). Maybe you could open a draft merge request there and see how it goes?Some comments about the PoC itself: [...] Cheers,
Putting the scripts into `devscripts` package would imply that `devscripts` becomes part of the `bootstrap essential` set of packages. I am not sure the `devscripts` maintainers are interested in that, because it implies you cannot arbitrarily add new Dependencies. As an example, if `devscripts` depends on even a single `arch:any` perl package, then the next `perl` transition could have `debhelper` become uninstallable, which is not going to be fun for anyone around at that time.
Additionally, `devscripts` seems to have a bit of "come and go"-style maintainership, so the average contributor will not have this caveat in mind making it even more likely that problem would occur down the line. the problem does not become visible immediately when you add the dependency. It first appears when `debhelper` is suddenly uninstallable and then it is too late.
Therefore, I strongly recommend *against* putting it into `devscripts`.Other than that, I am looking forward to seeing this in sid (and later stable-backports).
Best regards, NielsPS: The `python` dependency of Helmut script is not a deal breaker itself. We have other bootstrap critical packages depending on python just as we have with perl. It is really about perl XS modules and python C modules maintained outside the interpreter packages, since they would need to be rebuilt during a transition (but then wait for `debhelper` to become installable, except `debhelper` needs the rebuilt version to be installable).
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