Re: actively notifying users of removed packages

[Karl Chen <quarl@cs.berkeley.edu>]

>>>>> On 2008-03-11 06:52 PDT, Lucas Nussbaum writes:

    Lucas> If you are only interested in a few packages, you could
    Lucas> subscribe to them on the PTS. I recently worked on a
    Lucas> script to notify PTS subscribers ('summary' keyword)
    Lucas> when the package is orphaned or removed.  (see
    Lucas> #464021)

>>>>> On 2008-03-11 06:57 PDT, Andreas Bombe writes:

    Andreas> It's no active notification, but aptitude lists all
    Andreas> installed packages that aren't in any distribution
    Andreas> included in sources.list under "Obsolete and Locally
    Andreas> Created Packages".  Verifying that this doesn't
    Andreas> include any packages that I expect there (like
    Andreas> locally compiled kernel module packages) is my way of
    Andreas> checking for removed packages.

Good points, I also discovered Synaptic works well for manually
looking for removed packages.  Notifying PTS subscribers by email
also sounds very useful.  Still, I worry about the people who
don't know to check for removed packages - and aren't watching 
the packages that happened to be removed.

Karl