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Re: Handling of removed packages



/me seems to remember a fairly recent discussion about this...
Right: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2008/03/msg00354.html

Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt wrote:
> Our current package management doesn't handle this case at all, so we

That is not entirely true: aptitude (and also dselect) does clearly display 
obsolete and locally built packages in a separate category.
IMHO is any package management _frontend_ that does not do that in some way 
(category, color, flag, ...) buggy [1]. Preferably they should also offer 
some easily accessible help (especially graphical frontends).

Also, the Release Notes pay quite a lot of attention to this issue:
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html#s-obsolete

And there are special tools to find obsolete packages (see link above).

What is true is that the package management _command line tools_ do not 
display any info about such packages.

> might need to fix this - we just need to decide how. The probably
> easiest way would be to make apt whine on all packages that are not
> available in any version at one of the locations specified in
> sources.list. This trivial solution sucks, because locally created
> packages [1] also fall in this category.

This would for me be unacceptable as it interferes too much with normal 
work.

What could be an option is to have apt and aptitude display the number of 
such packages in their summaries, preferably with an apt.conf option to 
turn that off for people who do check for such packages by other means.

Cheers,
FJP

[1] Maybe we should define a minimum set of features a package management 
_frontend_ must have before it may advertise itself as no longer alpha or 
beta quality?

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