Re: Mass-remove zombie golang-*-dev sources before forky?

Eric Dorland <[email protected]> Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:03:12 -0400

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<aoKH_C7ldBGlvvWz@colossus>

* Simon Josefsson ([email protected]) wrote:
> Eric Dorland <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> >> I've prepared a list of Go source/library packages (i.e., a Debian
> >> source package providing a single golang-*-dev binary containing source
> >> code for building other packages) that have no reverse dependencies in
> >> Debian.  There are 205 packages dated 2020 or earlier, which are
> >> candidates for removal:
> >> 
> >> https://salsa.debian.org/go-team/infra/golang-qa-find-zombies/-/jobs/10136666#L141
> >
> > [snip]
> >
> > This looks great but I wonder how much of it is specific to Go
> 
> None really (except for some hard coded 'golang' strings).
> 
> > and shouldn't just be applied in general to all library packages?
> 
> Are you thinking of Rust?

I was thinking about Rust but also dev packages in general.

> For C, I'm not so sure the concept is applicable.  Debian C "library
> packages" normally contains a binary shared/static library that can be
> useful for a user.
> 
> The Golang "library package" only contains source code, packaged and
> installed in a way that I doubt has any value to anyone not building
> Debian Go Packages.
> 
> For Python I think things are different too -- if I install a Python
> library from Debian, my 'python3' binary will know about it, and I can
> build non-Debian applications using that library, and I think this isn't
> uncommon.
> 
> So maybe the situation for Go in Debian is a bit special here.  I don't
> know if Rust is more similar to Go though, could be.

I think Rust is very similar to Go in this case, ie many/most packaged
library crates are just source code.

You make some good points about C library packages, but I'm not sure
Debian should be carrying packages just on the off chance people want
to be able to build against them. Maybe popcon could be used as input
to see if people are actually installing these packages for that
purpose?

-- 
Eric Dorland <[email protected]>
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