Re: What replaces glimpse?

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 05:38:25PM +0100, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> On 03 Sep 2001, Andras BALI wrote:
> > No, glimpse is removed from the Debian archive for good due to the
> > fact that there was no new upload for almost three years and it had a
> > grave security bug since March 2000.  Newer upstream versions of
> > glimpse seems to have unacceptable license for Debian.
> 
> Yes, after looking at the glimpse web page I gathered that it was
> probably a 'political' decision to remove it; it seems to have become
> shareware, so it's fair enough.

Partly political, yes, in the sense that a lot of developers care less
about fixing broken non-free stuff. Although it would probably have been
kept around if not for the many security holes - I looked at the code,
and it really did appear to be written with no thought of security
whatsoever.

Basically, its lack of maintenance came up on -qa, nobody seemed to have
any interest in taking it over or at least keeping it on life-support
for a bit longer, so it was considered better to drop it.

Since it comes up here every now and then, there are several reasons why
you might see packages listed as "obsolete/local" in dselect?

  * The maintainer decides that it's no longer needed. Maintainers have
    pretty much total control over their packages, so not much more is
    needed. Somebody else might decide to reintroduce it, of course.

  * It's no longer built from any source package; this usually means
    that it's been superseded by a later version or otherwise renamed
    (e.g. libraries), but sometimes means that one variant of a package
    has been dropped (ted-gtk was a recent example).

  * It's "maintained" by the Quality Assurance Group, i.e. orphaned, and
    eventually it becomes obvious that nobody is interested in taking
    responsibility for it properly, so we drop it.

  * It has release-critical (serious or above) bugs which aren't being
    fixed. Usually this only results in the package being dropped for
    one release, but sometimes it's removed altogether.

In all cases, you should be able to find the exact reason why the
package was removed at:

  http://ftp-master.debian.org/removals.txt

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]