RE: Proposed change to debian release system

["Julian Mehnle" <lists@mehnle.net>]

Scott Minns wrote:
> Thanks for your reply’s, I like the idea of making some packages
> "perishable" the trouble is where would you draw the line?

We could add an optional control field "Expires: $date" to packages, so package maintainers could decide for themselves.  After a package has expired, it would only be installed with a warning or even with the admin explicitly confirming he wants to install it anyway.

I know this is no panacea, since in many cases, the maintainer cannot know whether a package will perish at all (like when all spammers promptly give up "advancing" their software, so a given version of spamassassin would stay useful forever)... ;-)