Bug#476707: Requesting removal of aterm from Debian?

[Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org>]

Hi,

Guylhem wrote:
> I was very busy and could not find time for aterm.

Happens. Are you still interested in aterm?

> If you believe there is a strong enough demand for aterm, I can try to
> maintain it.

I'm not sure there's a strong _demand_. I only see that there are
(now) about 900 installations reported by popcon[0]. Out of these 900
machines, there are about 180 machines where it's actively used
according to popcon[0].

[0] http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=aterm&show_installed=on&show_vote=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1

But then again that 400 installations bump at the end of 2012 hasn't
raised the amount of people using it. It's likely a mass installation
in a bug pool because one or two of the pool users asked for it and it
has been installed in all of the pool, but is used only on very few
machines of it.

And if you look at the percentages in popcon[1] it looks way more
clear that aterm's popularity is steadily (but also only very slowly)
decreasing.

[1] http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=aterm&show_installed=on&show_vote=on&want_percent=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1

So if we decide to remove aterm from Debian, I suggest to create a
transitional package containing a symlink /usr/bin/aterm to urxvt and
a dependency on rxvt-unicode, likely being built from the rxvt-unicode
source package. (Cc'ing the rxvt-unicode maintainers.)

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
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