Re: libraries being removed from the archive
On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 10:08:04AM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote:
> > Hence the need for policy to dictate to the maintainer not to allow the
> > package to be removed before all other packages have transitioned. It
> > usually doesn't take much more work as long as the maintainer is even
> > aware of what will happen.
>
> It is not policy problem, it is a common sense one!
Common sense says otherwise :) You see, before we had katie and the
testing scripts, such removal of orphan libraries was done manually.
("orphan" because they no longer had a source package that built them).
Our experience was that packages that depended on them did not even start
to get updated until after we removed the old library. As long as the
old library was there, there was apparently no incentive for anyone
to recompile.
That's when we decided to just remove such libraries immediately,
and just let unstable be broken for a while. With most libraries
this works fine. There were a few libraries with so many dependencies
that an "oldlibs" version was necessary -- ncurses was in that
category, for example. But they were the exception, not the rule.
Of course, these days we have gnome and kde depending on every library
they can possibly find, and every other package depending on gnome
or kde (or both, if they can manage it), so the terrain may have
shifted somewhat...
Richard Braakman
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