Re: Handling of removed packages
Hi.
Le jeudi 29 mai 2008 à 13:24 +0200, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt a écrit :
> Heya,
>
> For some time now, I have been thinking about the problem of packages
> which are removed from the archive at some point, without an (enforced)
> transition to a new package name. Users of such packages keep them
> around, usually never noticing the fact that no security (or other)
> support is available anymore.
>
> Our current package management doesn't handle this case at all, so we
> might need to fix this - we just need to decide how. The probably
> easiest way would be to make apt whine on all packages that are not
> available in any version at one of the locations specified in
> sources.list. This trivial solution sucks, because locally created
> packages [1] also fall in this category. So, has anyone a good idea
> solving this problem, without needing to keepr masses of status/diff/bla
> files around?
>
> Marc
>
> Footnotes:
> [1] Such as kernel packages, binary kernel modules built from sources
> available in the archive, local configuration packages, ...
I'd like to add some 2 more cents,
Maybe it would be interesting to have also some explanation easily
understandable for regular users, of why it gets removed, whenever a
package gets removed from the archive.
For instance, right at the moment, ntpdate and update-manager got
removed from the testing archive, but all I can read from the PTS (which
is the only tool I know to try and understand why they're removed) is
something like :
[2008-05-31] ntp REMOVED from testing (Britney)
and then the message it links to says :
FYI: The status of the ntp source package
in Debian's testing distribution has changed.
Previous version: 1:4.2.4p4+dfsg-5
Current version: (not in testing)
Hint: (no removal hint found)
That's clearly strange for a regular user, and looks like some buggy
"britney" daemon acting on the archive, or something... and users
whishing to be reassured that its on purpose that the packages were
removed don't have a very obvious indication on where to try and report
the problem, IMHO.
Of course, I hope there's an explanation in this very case of why ntp
and update-manager got removed... and any hints would be welcome too ;)
Hope this helps,
--
Olivier BERGER <olivier.berger@it-sudparis.eu> (*NEW ADDRESS*)
http://www-inf.it-sudparis.eu/~olberger/ - OpenPGP-Id: 1024D/6B829EEC
Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF
Institut TELECOM / TELECOM & Management SudParis (http://www.it-sudparis.eu/), Evry
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