Bug#539014: qa.debian.org: show link to removal bug on package QA page

[Stuart Prescott <stuart+debian@nanonanonano.net>]

Package: qa.debian.org
Severity: wishlist

Helping people on #debian, I often need to work out why a package is no
longer available. This tends to be asked in the following situations:

  * why isn't package xyz available in lenny (or squeeze or sid)? It used 
    to exist in etch! (Answer: could be renamed, dead upstream, etc)

  * why isn't package xyz available in lenny? it's in both etch and sid!
    (Answer: it was removed from testing just before release because it was
    RC buggy, but working out precisely why this is can be harder after the
    release has been made)

  * why isn't package xyz available in testing but it's in unstable?
    (Answer: all the usual migration and rc buggy reasons and fairly easy
    to answer these days)

A recent example was the grace6 package. So let's see what was required:

1. Go to the source package's QA page

  http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/grace6.html

2. look down the list of News items to find a "Removed from unstable" entry

3. look at news item to see bug number

4. go to bugs.debian.org/bugnumber

5. finally I get to look at the reasons why the package was removed


Solving the "why did package xyz not make it into the current stable 
release" question is usually just a matter of wandering down to
find the "removed from testing" news entry instead and repeating the above
process.


It would be *much* nicer if the QA page had a link to the RM bug itself as
that cuts out quite a few manual steps in the middle. So instead of:

    [2009-06-14] Removed 5.99.1+dev4-7 from unstable (Frank Lichtenheld)

can we have

    [2009-06-14] Removed 5.99.1+dev4-7 from unstable #459484 "RM: grace6 -- RoQA; orphaned, buggy, not really version 6" (Frank Lichtenheld)

or similar? (with appropriate hyperlinks)


Have thoughts!

cheers
Stuart