Bug#1100677: Pending autoremoval of debian-reference* packages

[t***@uchuujin.de]

I belive debian wants to provide its documentation as packages in stable releases.

But currently debian-reference is scheduled for auto removal on 2025-04-15
(which this mail bumps a bit into the future).
Maybe "nobody" is aware of this?

Anyone up to taking a look at this?

Package: debian-reference-de,debian-reference-en,debian-reference-es,debian-reference-fr,debian-reference-id,debian-reference-it,debian-reference-ja,debian-reference-pt,debian-reference-pt-br,debian-reference-zh-cn,debian-reference-zh-tw
Version: 2.125
Severity: serious
Usertags: fileconflict
Control: affects -1 + debian-reference-common
The debian-reference packages have a tricky undeclared file conflict
that may break bookworm to trixie upgrades. In bookworm,
debian-reference-common contains a symlink
/usr/share/doc/debian-reference-common/docs pointing to
../../debian-reference whereas the debian-references-* packages in
trixie install the same location as a directory. On the face of it, this
is an undeclared file conflict. Really though, a bad unpack order can
cause the unpack of the trixie files to be redirected and then go
missing as this is a symlink to directory conversion moving between
packages. The debian-refefence-* packages really need to prevent
concurrent unpack with bookworm's debian-reference-common. Breaks and
Replaces is not sufficient here. I think the options basically are using
Conflicts or upgrading the versioned dependency on
debian-reference-common to a Pre-Depends (requires consultation with
d-devel). The latter option is a larger hammer and prevents a weird
corner case that is not covered by Conflicts.
Helmut

[Andreas Metzler]

Following up on my previous post.

How about adding simpler versioned depends (no pre-depends) with pre-rm
script?

I am talking about tricks using the "dpkg-maintscript-helper
symlink_to_dir ..." command. Any thought?

[deleting drafted response]

This has been resolved in the BTS.

cu Andreas