Hi everybody,
- There is no upstream that bundles these extensions together like this.
there is almost no upstream who creates Debian packages and yet Debian
does it.
- There is no unifying theme for why these extensions are included and
why others are not included, except perhaps these extensions are
useful to the Maintainer.
This is a good point. Maybe all other extensions could be put into this
package as well?
From my point of view all similar packages, where the metainformation is
bigger than the data, should be somehow combined into one package.
Another good candidate to add to gome-shell-extensions-extra would be
gnome-shell-extension-hide-activities.
- It is not possible to use apt to determine the upstream version
number for these extensions.
From a user point of view I don't care about versions. But I do care
about processing time of apt.
- It is not possible to use uscan to check for new upstream releases
This is not true. uscan can handle multiple upstream tar files.
The node people are using this feature for exact this reason: combine
several small packages into one bigger one.
- It is not easily possible for the Security Team to determine whether
security bugs and fixes apply to this package.
There are lots of packages where the CVE description from Mitre does not
match the package name in Debian.
So the Security Team already has to deal with this for other packages. I
assume for that reason check_new_issues from the security tracker does
exist to support them with this problem.
Anyway, looking at the list of CVEs there are seven CVEs for package
gnome-shell since 1999 and none for any gnome-shell-extension-*.
This argument sounds like a pretended one.
- There is a namespace concern. Since the GNOME project officially
maintains something called "gnome-shell-extensions", it is possible
they may eventually produce something called
"gnome-shell-extensions-extra" as they have done with
"gnome-themes-extra".
At the moment there are only packages called gnome-shell-extension-* in
the archive. The combined package is called gnome-shell-extensions-*
I don't see a namespace concern here.
- Twice per year, GNOME releases a new major version of GNOME Shell
which breaks all GNOME Shell extensions (...)
I personally verified that this was in place for all the independently
packaged extensions in Debian Testing for the GNOME 44 release. This
package does not have these relations in debian/control and cannot.
You just have a versioned Depends: on gnome-shell in debian/control. Why
shouldn't this be possible for a combined package, when all extensions
are broken?
I am initially filing this bug as Serious because I believe the
current packaging is unsupportable and violates paragraph 5(a) of
https://release.debian.org/testing/rc_policy.txt
This paragraph relates to policy 2.2.1. This is basically about
dependencies outside of main, policy requirements and bugs within the
package. Can you please be a bit more verbose where you see bugs?
Shouldn't they be reported upstream?
On Mon, 6 Feb 2023, Daniel Baumann wrote:
Thorsten: please advise on how to go forward. Should I re-upload them as
seperate packages again and we remove gnome-shell-extensions-extras?
Daniel: the only valid argument from Jeremy is about apt not showing the
upstream version. But I don't think this justifies a penalty for all
Debian users.
So no, please keep gnome-shell-extensions-extras.
Regards,
Thorsten
