Josh Triplett writes ("Bug#904248: Beginnings of a patch to add netbase to
build-essential"):
> On Mon, 15 Oct 2018 13:39:32 +0100 Ian Jackson
> <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> > My proposed wording about "longstanding and conventionally available
> > service and protocol names and numbers" says that if the admin has
> > modified the file they need to make sure their modified version isn't
> > toally borked.
>
> Which effectively means the admin should never delete any existing entry
> in the file, only add their own.
It's a config file. If you make semantically unwise changes to a
config file you get to keep all the remaining pieces. I'm not sure
why that is controversial ?
> It doesn't seem reasonable for a package to require a particular entry
> in a conffile in order to build. Packages should contain that
> information themselves.
Looking up protocols and services entries at build time was once
regarded as good practice. And there is nothing particularly wrong
with it.
> Much like /usr/share/misc/pci.ids and other such databases that record
> the state of the real world and standards committees, editing these
> files at all seems questionable. Suppose, hypothetically, that these
> files all moved to /usr/share/misc/ , and then libnss_files.so learned
> to read both /etc/$file and /usr/share/misc/$file , with the former not
> existing by default? (We could also switch to a faster lookup mechanism,
> but let's not change too many things simultaneously.)
This is all a lovely hypothetical world.
> (This is separate from the problem that netbase should *still* not be
> build-essential, as several have said on this thread. Personally, I'm
> leaning increasingly in the direction of "even an explicit build-depends
> on netbase should be treated as a sign of a bug in the package".)
You don't seem to be addressing the same situation as I am at all.
And you don't have any answer to gregor herrmann's point that these
failures are not uncommon. I don't understand what the huge objection
is to this pretty harmless package.
Ian.
--
Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own.
If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is
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