On woensdag 13 november 2019 11:39:08 CET Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 12:01:51AM +0100, Diederik de Haas wrote:
> > I don't know if "Debian Package Tracker" is a Web Shortcuts which is part
> > of a normal installation or if I have added it manually myself.
> > The "Shortcut URL:" is "https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/\{@}";
> >
> > Using that, you can easily select each package name and then look it up in
> > "tracker.debian.org" and see what the status is. If you see "Removed
> > <version> from unstable" and/or "<package> REMOVED from testing", then
> > you should get rid of it in most cases.
>
> Just use apt-show-versions, filtering by "No available version in archive".
That's indeed useful to quickly identify the cruft :)
Still, it doesn't show even close the amount of information that I get through
tracker.d.o. (I've become a big fan of t.d.o)
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/kopete shows me the following:
Versions that are present in o-o-stable, oldstable, stable, experimental (thus
not in testing or sid). In the 'news' section I can click on the link
"Removed 4:17.08.3-2.1 from unstable" which tells me:
------------------- Reason -------------------
RoQA; Obsolete libs - Qt4
----------------------------------------------
and a link to https://bugs.debian.org/935659 and that bug tells me:
"The current unstable version is Qt4. There is a Qt5 version in
experimental, but the maintainer has not yet concluded it's appropriate
to include in a future release. Once the Qt5 version is ready, it can
be uploaded to unstable to re-introduce the package. In the meantime,
it doesn't make sense to block further progress on removing Qt4."
So now I know that kopete was removed because its using Qt4 and that that is
apparently (and rightfully) considered obsolete. If you do the t.d.o thing a
number of times you'd likely/rightfully concluded that all Qt4 apps/libs are
removed from the unstable/testing archives. You can/should conclude that maybe
you ought to remove those as well.
In the case of kopete you'd have also learned that there is a version in
experimental which uses Qt5 and that the maintainer currently thinks it is
unsuitable to end up in a next stable release. This could change in the future
and you could decide for yourself to help with that by installing the version
from experimental anyway and reporting bugs if you encounter them. Ofc all the
caveats of experimental applies and also the warning by the maintainer in this
specific case. In any case, you have enough info to make an informed decision.
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