Debian Developers Figuring Out Plan For Removing More Unmaintained Packages
Recently Debian developer Helmut Grohne initiated the Debian development discussion around removing more packages from the unstable archive. He argued in favor of more aggressively removing unmaintained packages from the archive given the QA-related costs, additional work/complexities when dealing with major fundamental changes to Debian, and other non-trivial costs to keeping old packages around. When carrying out a query to automate some packages potentially up for removal, under the criteria they are affected by an RC bug that has been last modified more than one year ago, among other criteria. There were more than 300 packages found with the initial query.
Being brought into the discussion was whether results from Debian's popularity contest "popcon" should be part of the consideration for determining packages that are unused or with only very limited installations. The matter of whether the decision to remove old packages from Debian unstable should be more automated or not.
No firm decision has been made yet but Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille summed up the current discussion within the latest Bits from the DPL post for September. Tille concluded his remarks on the discussion with:
"I would love for this discussion to lead to more aggressive removals that we can agree upon, whether they are automated, semi-automated, or managed by a person processing an automatically generated list (supported by an objective procedure). To use an analogy: I’ve found that every image collection improves with aggressive pruning. Similarly, I’m convinced that Debian will improve if we remove packages that no longer serve our users well."
We'll see ultimately what actions are taken for removing some of these unmaintained packages in the massive Debian archive.
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