[Debian-med-packaging] Why is tk8.4 removal triggering autoremoval messages of not depending packages at this point in time (Was: staden is marked for autoremoval from testing)

[Thibaut Paumard]

Dear Andreas,

Le 31/12/2016 à 08:23, Andreas Tille a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 04:40:32AM +0000, Debian testing autoremoval watch wrote:
>> staden 2.0.0+b11-2 is marked for autoremoval from testing on 2017-01-29
>>
>> It (build-)depends on packages with these RC bugs:
>> 734837: tk8.4: Time to remove from testing
> 
> Staden Build-Depends: tk-dev (without any version) and the binary
> package Depends: libtk8.6 (>= 8.6.0) so I do not understand this
> autoremoval message in principle and I specifically wonder why this
> happens at this point in time.

I cannot tell you why this message appears, in particular for staden (no
matter how hard I grep staden's dependencies, I cannot find tk8.4 in it).

However I can tell you why it's happening now. This is due to the recent
bogus run of testing migrations.  734837 is a sort of "pseudo" RC bug
that was there to prevent tk8.4 from migrating again to testing. Yet a
bug in the transition script let it go through. Now the auroremoval
stuff rightly wants to remove it again, and for some reason
misinterprets its reverse dependencies.

I would believe removing tk8.4 by hand from testing could fix the lot of
associated autoremovals.

Dear release team, thoughts on that?

Kind regards, Thibaut.


> Staden is juat an example for a set of packages with the same problem.
> 
> Kind regards
> 
>     Andreas.
>