On Thu, May 10, 2018 at 11:24:35AM +0200, Laurent Bigonville wrote:
Debian seems to contains to version of rng-tool packaged in two
different src package (rng-tool, last upload in 2011 and rng-tool5,
last upload yesterday).
This might be confusing for our users.
Shouldn't rng-tools package be removed and/or rng-tools5 renamed to
rng-tools? Any reason to keep that old version in debian?
rng-tools5 doesn't support everything that's in rng-tools, so it isn't a
direct replacement. The command line syntax changed, so existing
configurations won't work. It would have been better if upstream had
picked a different name for the new program, but without a time machine
I can't fix that. :) As a practical matter, I would expect that the
hardware supported only by the original package will eventually be
obsolete to the point that debian won't run on it, at which point the
distinction becomes moot. In theory someone could write a preinst that
would check to see whether the current configuration is compatible, then
set rng-tools5 to replace rng-tools but abort if it won't work--but as a
practical matter, I would expect a large proportion of working rng-tools
configurations to break trying to move them to rng-tools5, and for those
that do work I wouldn't expect any benefits.
Yes, it's confusing, but I've tried to add keywords to the description
to suggest that rng-tools5 is the one you want for newer hardware.
(RDRAND/RDSEED)
Mike Stone
