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

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Control: severity -1 important

On 2014-01-06 21:28, Niels Thykier wrote:
> 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
> notification.
> 
> 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 notification severe enough that we should
> consider temporarily suspending non-leaf / recursive removals until
> resolved.
> 

Recursive removals have been temporarily disabled, downgrading the bug
accordingly.

> 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
> 
> [...]
> 

I am looking into making trille send out mails for this kind of thing.

~Niels