On 2024-11-06 Andreas Tille <ti...@debian.org> wrote:
> Am Wed, Nov 06, 2024 at 06:40:41PM +0100 schrieb Andreas Metzler:
>> Are you really convinced we would not be better off dropping this
>> from Debian instead? mpg321 is stone-dead upstream (last commit about 12
>> years ago), alternatives with active upstream exist and are packaged.
> Well, my motivation was a popcon (vote!) > 100 to think there are some
> users. I'm aware that upstream is dead but we have other packages
> with dead upstream in Debian with way less users (and way more effort
> to fix some RC bug).
Hello Andreas,
well, other similar pieces of software are not that easy to replace. ;-)
> I perfectly get your point but I'd prefer some soft migration for the
> users. For instance we might write down those alternatives inside
> README.Debian (which would you recommend). We could even try some
> NEWS.Debian warning users that this is dead and recommend something
> else.
I think you have a very fair chance that less than 1 of 100000 users
would take a peek into README.Debian on a whim. NEWS.Debian will be
seen more often.
But still this approach ("Drag it through another stable release just to
show a message") is not sustainable for dealing with removal. We just
drop them and expect people to deal with obsolete packages as described
in the release notes
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html#obsolete
You might wonder why I picked the whole thing up: During the usr-merge
transition I also regularily looked at the rc bug list and also stumbled
over mpg321. ATM I thought it would be better to drop it and filed bugs
against all rdeps to switch to mpg123 (or whatever they preferred).
cu Andreas
--
`What a good friend you are to him, Dr. Maturin. His other friends are
so grateful to you.'
`I sew his ears on from time to time, sure'
