Dealing with the mess around package hepmc and its reverse-dependencies in Debian

[Boyuan Yang]

Dear Lifeng and other Debian Science Team developers,

I am currently working in Debian to completely remove package multiarch-
support and all its reverse dependencies. Some of its background can be found 
at https://bugs.debian.org/783898 and [2].

On a current Debian Sid (+experimental) system, we have:

% apt-cache rdepends multiarch-support
multiarch-support
Reverse Depends:
  libhepmc4
    multiarch-support:i386
  openjdk-7-jre-headless      *experimental only
    multiarch-support:i386
  libsass0                    *cruft
    multiarch-support:i386
  libbitcoin0v5
    multiarch-support:i386
  libhepmcfio4
    multiarch-support:i386

..in which libhepmc4 and libhepmcfio4 are all provided by src:hepmc.

Unfortunately, hepmc in Debian is unmaintained, FTBFS for years and has been 
requested to be removed from Debian, see [1]. However, its removal is blocked 
by some other packages, which are all under Debian Science Team and previously 
maintained by Lifeng Sun. It seems that Lifeng Sun is not active anymore and 
the best solution seems to be removing all packages involved.

Dear Lifeng, if you read this email, please feel free to tell me about your 
planned / potential future work in Debian. If you are returning to Debian for 
further contribution, I would be glad to assist you with that. If you are 
unlikely to continue maintaining those packages in the forseeable future, 
please also write back (either privately or publicly is okay) so that the team 
could take care of those packages for QA purposes.

To the rest of the debian-science team: I would be glad to work with you and 
do some QA works so that the eventual multiarch-support package removal can be 
achieved sooner, ideally before Debian Buster freeze. It might be better if we 
could set up a deadline for reaction, e.g., wait for another 30 days or 60 
days to see if there's any chance of improvement. After that, I would propose 
that we submit RM bugs for them so that they are not left in Sid forever.

Your ideas and suggestions would be appreciated.

--
Regards,
Boyuan Yang



[1] https://bugs.debian.org/885180
[2] https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bts-usertags.cgi?tag=multiarch-support-removal&user=debian-glibc%40lists.debian.org
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