Hi, Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt wrote:
> For some time now, I have been thinking about the problem of packages > which are removed from the archive at some point, without an (enforced) > transition to a new package name. Users of such packages keep them > around, usually never noticing the fact that no security (or other) > support is available anymore. Maybe it should be mandatory to always have a transition package for packages which are being removed from the archives? For example, when package X_0.1 is to be removed from the archive, there has to be a transition to a package X-obsoleted_0.1 (which is in fact the same as X_0.1). As addition, some mean of telling the user "There are $NUM installed packages on your system that seem to be abandoned: X-obsoleted" could be established (either in apt, aptitude, or apt-listchanges), with the option to turn off this message (I wouldn't want to have to read this every day). > Our current package management doesn't handle this case at all, so we > might need to fix this - we just need to decide how. The probably > easiest way would be to make apt whine on all packages that are not > available in any version at one of the locations specified in > sources.list. This trivial solution sucks, because locally created > packages [1] also fall in this category. IMHO, packages that are not (and never have been) available from the Debian archives should be left alone from any 'detect unsupported packages'-mechanisms. The user decided to install these packages, so he/she will have to deal with keeping them up to date or uninstall them once they are not maintained anymore. Cheers, Wolf -- I hope that when I die, people say about me, 'Boy, that guy sure owed me a lot of money.' (Jack Handey) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
