Re: To be removed from wheezy as well
On 19/12/17 14:01, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 19 Dec 2017, Salvatore Bonaccorso wrote:
>>> Actually it got removed from wheezy in the mean time. Since it was
>>> marked that way in dla-needed.txt, I pinged the ftp.d.o bug report and
>>> pinged Chris Lamb (as ftp assistant) and the package is gone from wheezy:
>>>
>>> $ rmadison libnet-ping-external-perl
>>> libnet-ping-external-perl | 0.13-1 | oldstable-kfreebsd | source, all
>>>
>>> https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libnet-ping-external-perl
>>
>> But I don't think thas worked as you might have expected, and it's not
>> really gone yet. While the dak rm works, there is no point release
>> mechanism for wheezy (LTS) and you still will find
>> libnet-ping-external-perl in the archive (and on the mirrors), as
>> there was not the usual procedure of removing the package, making a
>> new release, and pushing out the updates to the mirrors.
>
> Indeed, you are right:
> rhertzog@nas:/srv/debian/mirror/dists/wheezy/main/binary-i386$ zgrep libnet-ping-external-perl Packages.gz
> Package: libnet-ping-external-perl
> Filename: pool/main/libn/libnet-ping-external-perl/libnet-ping-external-perl_0.13-1_all.deb
>
> The Packages* files have not been updated since June 4th 2016. Only the Release file
> gets regular updates.
>
> Maybe it's time to see what is required to be able to update wheezy... I don't
> think there's any technical reason behind this behaviour. It's just policy that
> we don't want to touch the Packages* files except during point releases.
>
> Given the current LTS policies, I believe that we could have unannounced point
> releases that do not increment any version number... as long as we just remove
> some packages.
>
> Chris or Thorsten, could you possibly look into what it involves and see whether
> it's doable on the ftpmaster side ?
Another, easier option would be to declare these packages as unsupported
security-wise.
Cheers,
Emilio
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