Re: future of Debian amavisd-milter package

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Paul Gevers writes ("Re: future of Debian amavisd-milter package"):
> On 08-12-16 23:24, Christoph Biedl wrote:
> > Although I'm not a user of that package, I consider removing it from
> > stretch the wrong thing to do.
> 
> Opinions differ. I raised the issue of removing more packages from
> Debian a while ago and got different responses.¹
> 
> If nobody is maintaining such a package and the package is not trivial,
> IMHO it may be better to not ship. Until now I am not convinced that
> shipping "not severely broken" packages is a service. I remember in the
> past that I had choice of multiple packages doing approximately the same
> thing and several were in bad shape. I wasted time on figuring out which
> one actually worked reasonably well. At the time (long ago), it didn't
> occur to me yet to file bugs, but the example stuck with me.

I don't think this problem should be solved by completely removing
packages which are essentially "in hibernation".  Removing the
packages is quite difficult to work around for users, whereas this
discov erability problem is much more tractable.

For example, as an end user, you can look up the package on
tracker.d.o or bugs.d.o, to get a feel for it.

And if we wanted something more formal, we could invent a way to mark
packages as deprecated.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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