On Tue, 9 Dec 2008 19:32:27 +0000 David Goodenough <david.goodenough@btconnect.com> wrote: > Well perhaps what is needed is a way of marking a package as > deprecated, and this was what I was trying (badly) to achieve. > Better to be explicit. Maybe "Section: oldlibs" needs to be more forcefully expressed? "Any library in Section: oldlibs will be removed from Debian after the next stable release." That just moves the debate to the decision about when the library should change section. There will always be that point where some want it marked and some do not. There can be no hard-and-fast rule, each case has to be decided on merit which is where the disputes start. > This would trigger a warning whenever it was built rather than > actually stopping it being build. That way package maintainers would > gets warning in good time that they need to make the required changes > before the package is actually removed. I doubt that this would make a huge difference - it would have to be more than just a warning. To me, only having gtk1.2 in stable is a sufficient solution for now - i.e. make it impossible for any packages depending on gtk1.2 to be released in Squeeze. Maybe it's too late to remove gtk1.2 from Lenny, sadly. Marking a package as worth removal is a technical step - deciding if a package warrants such a tag cannot be reduced to a set of rules that would apply equally across all such cases, we need discussion and an eventual consensus. gtk1.2 shows that a consensus is unlikely to become unanimous and some people, some packages, will simply have to lose out. We can set guidelines for how to determine that point but I find it hard to see how a uniform set of rules can be devised to meet all such cases. We can try and say that a particular library must only have N number of SONAMEs in Debian at the same time but then we have libdb4.x to sort out first. We could say that a particular library must have no more than N number of reverse dependencies that have not migrated before being marked as warranting removal - in reality that would have to be a percentage but then we would probably have dropped GnuCash a long time before it was finally ported to Gtk+2.0, so the relative importance of the reverse dependencies comes into play. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/ http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/
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