Re: libraries being removed from the archive
Richard Braakman wrote:
> 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.
That's experience, not common sense.
Regards,
Joey
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