On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 06:05:26PM +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote: > I don't think this removal was such a good idea. Certainly, cleaning up > the archive is a valid goal, but breaking dozens of packages along the > way is not. The submitter of this bug did not offer the affected > packages any upgrade path. Some of the affected packages have reached > maintenance stages where it's unreasonable for the upstream maintainer > to make a new release just to upgrade automake. Note that > re-automaking all the affected packages as part of the packaging is > likely to create larger diffs and will thus increase the size of the > archives, perhaps more than what is saved by removing automake1.6.
I think it was a good idea to remove it. As the maintainer noted, it's the 5th or so automake version in the archive, of series of similar (but indeed not 100% compatible) versions. It's laudeable to try to reduce the number of versions out there. The maintainer also announced his intention four months ago, cc'ing all involved maintainers, and there wasn't a single public reply to his mail afaics. Also he filed wishlist bugs on all involved packages 5 weeks ago, giving again ample time for people to prepare on migrating. The removal also doesn't involve any inconvenience for users, it only prohibits rebuilds and new uploads. This, together with the fact that upgrading to automake1.7 (available in Debian well over 3 years now) is said to be really simple and also, assistance was offered by the automake maintainer, made it an easy call for me. Sure it'll cause some short-term inconvenience, but (1) it's early in the release cycle, and (2) we're ending up with less versions of the same software to maintain in etch etc. > automake1.6 did not have any bugs and did not burden anyone (except the > maintainer?), but he did not respond to my offer to orphan the package > first. I suggest that to unbreak the situation automake1.6 be > reuploaded and removed after all build dependencies are gone. Would > this be acceptable? Please don't, and spend your energy on upgrading your package(s) to automake1.7 or later, something you'll eventually need to do anyway. If packages were only removed after the last single package stops needing it, we'd be having tons of different versions of same packages in the archive. I do pay attention whether there's some sort of migration plan (advance warning to affected package maintainers being the simples instance of it), and whether the amount of reverse-(build-)depends is overseeable, but both were in the green in this case. --Jeroen -- Jeroen van Wolffelaar [EMAIL PROTECTED] (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357) http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
