Package: fusionforge-plugin-globalsearch
Version: 6.0.5-2
Severity: important
Control: block 555116 by -1
Recent discussion of package removals on -devel prompted me to look at
usertagged bugs regarding proposed package removals.
libgetopt-mixed-perl appears to be effectively unmaintained since 2009,
and is considered obsolete and deprecated since 2007; equivalent
functionality is provided by Getopt::Long in the Perl standard library
since Perl 5.005. However, because it has no active Debian maintainer,
the version in Debian has never been updated to one that has the
deprecation warning; in at least one case (dh-dist-zilla) a maintainer
has added a new dependency on Getopt::Mixed due to not realising it was
obsolete. This seems like a fairly clear case of a package that should
be removed from Debian so that it stops wasting people's time.
fusionforge was not in stretch and is not in testing due to other RC
bugs, so I don't think it should be considered a barrier to removing
libgetopt-mixed-perl from buster. Existing installations can continue
to use the libgetopt-mixed-perl from stretch.
One other package (cil) build-depends on libgetopt-mixed-perl, due to a
mistake in a previous upload that was meant to remove the
build-dependency. After that has been fixed, I'll ask for removal of
libgetopt-mixed-perl and raise the severity of this bug to RC.
Regards,
smcv
