On Sun, May 11, 2025 at 09:34:44PM +0100, Darac Marjal wrote:
I read some advice recently that suggested taking the time some thing has existed to be a "half-life" for deprecation. So, if the pre-deb822 format has existed for 27 years and we deprecated it now, we can expect 50% of users will have noticed the deprecation by the middle of the century. By the year 2100, a little over 10% of users will still be unaware or unwilling to change.
An important factor is whether the change brings a tangible benefit. In this case, I see zero reason for the average user to care that their sources.list is in a spiffy new format so I would expect many people to be uninterested in doing busy work. At least now there's a nag message to "encourage" them to do busy work. :-/
