Thomas Bushnell wrote:
This is not the correct way to orphan a package.
True. However, it is entirely legitimate for a maintainer to decide that a package is worthless and withdraw it, which is what Andres Salomon is planning to do. In fact, it's a kindness to the QA volunteers.
The orphaning process is properly for a package where the maintainer no longer has time or energy to maintain it, but thinks that it should still be in Debian (perhaps because it's widely used, or a dependency of some other maintainer's package). Using it for a package which the maintainer thinks should be removed is a bad idea, as it gives unnecessary work to QA.
So, Andres, please do file bugs against the ftp.debian.org pseudopackage requesting that the packages be removed, with the code "RoM" (== "request of maintainer") in the header.