How to get rid of unused packages (Was: proposed MBF: packages still using source format 1.0)
Hi,
the MBF announcement inspired me to check some packages that might be
relevant for me (and started fixing these). I also found some packages
where I was asking myself whether these might be interesting for anyone.
Just to give some example (maintainer in CC - Erik, its not specifically
against your package it was just some example).
The description of imgvtopgm reads:
PalmPilot/III Image Conversion utility
This program can convert, compress, and decompress up to 4-bit grayscale
images for displaying on the PalmPilot. It can take any pbm, pnm, pgm file
generated by the netpbm package and convert it into a suitable image
for the Pilot.
.
Together with netpbm many image formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF
and BMP, could be converted into PDB format. This can be displayed on
PalmPilot/III by viewers like "ImageViewer", "TinyViewer" or "Spec".
I'm not sure whether there are any PalmPilot devices out there. At
least the actual *votes* in popcon[1] is down to zero now. The package
was not uploaded by its maintainer for >10 years. It received an NMU by
Adrian Bunk (in CC as well):
[2022-01-02] imgvtopgm 2.0-9.1 MIGRATED to testing (Debian testing watch)
[2021-12-27] Accepted imgvtopgm 2.0-9.1 (source) into unstable (Adrian Bunk)
[2011-02-23] imgvtopgm 2.0-9 MIGRATED to testing (Debian testing watch)
[2011-02-13] Accepted imgvtopgm 2.0-9 (source i386) (signed by: Erik Schanze)
The changelog of that NMU was:
* Non-maintainer upload.
* debian/rules: Add build-{arch,indep}. (Closes: #999003)
>From my naive perspective this package caused some work from a quite
busy maintainer for no obvious user base. May be I'm wrong in this
specific case but this observation raises my question: Do we have any
means to get rid of packages that should be rather removed from the
distribution than draining resources.
If the answer is no should we possibly use the list of packages that are
not topic of the heated debate around the source format 1.0 (where
maintainers are obviously are caring about their packages just disagree
with format 3.0 format) to pick some packages that should be rather
removed than fixed?
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=imgvtopgm
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