[Pkg-emacsen-addons] Bug#873372: anything-el: package is outdated and obsolete, removal required

[Lev Lamberov]

Package: anything-el
Severity: grave

Dear Maintainer,

the last upload of the package in question was in Nov 2014 (version
1.287-2.1), which was a NMU upload, but the last maintainer's upload was
in Mar 2011 (version 1.287-2). Since then upstream renamed anything-el
[0] to helm and released 2.8.2 in Aug 2017 [1]. Moreover, since
anything-el was not maintained for a long time, helm was packaged
separately in Feb 2016 using new dh-elpa infrastructure, and currently
is team-maintained by pkg-emacsen [2].

The anything-el package is heavily outdated (as the indication in its
source code says it is tested only with Emacs 22/23, where there's Emacs
25 in stretch, and Emacs 24 will be removed from the archive soon),
don't use the modern Emacs addons infrastructure. Since according to
popcon there are some (47) users of the package [3], it should become a
transitional dummy package, which should depend on elpa-helm, and after
some time should be removed from Debian. Alternative approach would be
to remove anything-el, and build transitional dummy package from helm
source package to allow migrations.

Cheers!
Lev Lamberov

[0] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Anything

[1] https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

[2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/helm

[3] https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=anything-el

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.12.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=ru_RU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=ru_RU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)