Bug#734396: auto-removals: No notication to rdeps when they are in danger

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Package: release.debian.org
Severity: serious
Control: owner -1 !

When a package with reverse dependencies are considered for
auto-removal, the maintainers of receive dependencies do not receive a
notication.

This is a problem because these maintainers are then surprised when
their package is suddenly removed "without notice"[1].  We need to
ensure that maintainers of reverse dependencies receive adequate
notice of the pending removal of their package.
  Having reflected a bit on the issue after it was mentioned on IRC,
I consider the lack of this notication severe enough that we should
consider temporarily suspending non-leaf / recursive removals until
resolved.

However, I believe the "leaf-removal" case to have sufficient
notication (the RC bug itself being that notice).  That said, I would
still welcome them receiving a reminder when their package is put on
the auto-removal list.


The best suggestion I heard so far is mailing ${package}@packages.d.o,
when the package appears on the auto-removal list.  It would
definitely be a "push"-notication and it was considered sufficient by
the maintainers when we did these removals manually.

~Niels

[1] I am well aware of the auto-removal data sources and the UDD bugs
cgi script, but it is "pull" rather than "push" notication.  Even if
#727048 was resolved, I am not sure it counts as "push" - although,
it would definitely improve the situation.