Re: depends

[Adam Borowski <kilobyte@mimuw.edu.pl>]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2005, Christoph Berg wrote:
> Re: Adam Borowski in <[🔎] Pine.LNX.4.58L.0503082356020.8728@duch.mimuw.edu.pl>
> > [~]# debfoster
> > micq is keeping the following 2 packages installed:
> >   popularity-contest tcl8.4
> >   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > Keep micq? [Ynpsiuqx?], [H]elp: 
> 
> While this is a nice idea to improve the virtual popularity of your
> package, this package was removed a long time ago:
> 
> http://ftp-master.debian.org/removals.txt:
> 
> [Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 13:48:15 -0500] [ftpmaster: James Troup]
> ------------------- Reason -------------------
> ROM; broken, no upstream.
> ----------------------------------------------

Strange reason...  The upstream is alive and kicking.  The package was 
dropped from the archive with a loud BOOM after the upstream planted a 
timebomb because of being mightily upset about the Debian stable policy, 
but that doesn't made him non-existant.
The reason should state "malicious upstream" or some such.

IIRC the story was:
1. Mirabilis made a change to their servers that severely broken micq 
   (causing it to spam the user with a lot of error messages, making
   the user interface effectively useless).
2. Due to the stable policy, an update to the package in stable was 
   denied.
3. Mr. Kuhlmann kept being swamped with tons of bugs reports from users
   months after he fixed the package upstream.
4. He planted a timebomb in a new version, making the program stop working
   after a certain date, telling the user to update the package.
5. When the trojaned source was discovered, micq was dropped from Debian 
   with a lot of noise.


The packages are available from www.micq.org.  The "Depends: popcon" line 
was added in 1:0.5.0.1-0.2sarge1, dated Sun, 27 Feb 2005 18:00:08 +0200
-- it affects only those who have micq.org in their apt lines.

1KB
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