Re: To be removed from wheezy as well

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

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 ?

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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