[Debian-med-packaging] discussion: removal of packages from repository

[Charles Plessy]

Le Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 10:15:35AM +0100, Andreas Tille a écrit :
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 10:13:04PM +0100, Thorsten Alteholz wrote:
> 
> > The question is: In case a package has been removed from Debian, is
> > there any need to keep it in the repository? Or is it sufficient to
> > just create a README.status and purge the rest?
> 
> To avoid missunderstandings: Thorsten was asking whether to keep it in
> the SVN/Git repository (not the Debian package repository where the
> package in question was removed from). 
> 
> The question is whether our SVN/Git should at least reflect the latest
> packaging status (which could be restored in two ways by either checking
> out a specified revision or using snapshots.d.o) or just clean up
> everything.  An example is given in:
> 
>    svn://svn.debian.org/svn/debian-med/trunk/packages/molphy/trunk
> 
> where Thorsten decided to just keep README.status.  We will have the
> next case soonish once the denoiser package is removed (I asked for
> removal because this code is now included in qiime).
> 
> What do you think?

Hello everybody,

In Subversion, debian/README.status ensures that the VCS URLs stay valid.  From
this, a user can navigate the past history and checkout the source code.  So
I think it is useful.

In Git, I would rather move the whole repository to a directory called “removed”
or something like this.  But that breaks the URLs…

In general, I think that is is goot to signal retired packages in a strong way,
in order to avoid volunteers making QA work on them without noticing it is a
waste of their time.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan