Policy wrt to removal of packages which are part of a task

[Raphael Hertzog]

On Mon, 02 Jun 2008, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
>   First it's not part of a task, as it's pulled by a chain of
> recommends. Second, you've seen two gnome maintainers explaining to you
> on #-devel-fr why _they_ (as maintainers) are fine with that removal. So
> why are you still complaining ? It really doesn't help.

First, I wrote that mail before the discussion that you're referring to
and second I haven't read the same thing than you.

Josselin told that they need volunteers in the Gnome team to take care of
those packages and that he should prod Gustavo. Loic then told that we
shouldn't count on Gustavo because he sent a mail a few months ago stating
that he had no time for Debian anymore.

Nowhere did I saw anything about the removal. On the contrary I saw
Josselin downgraded #449040 to important and the 3 other RC bugs
are a matter of removing files in the postinst.

They do not cause user problems any more since we now use python2.5 and
left over in python 2.4 can't interfere (but that should still be
resolved).

So they are not so unusable as you say (and my wife uses that on lenny
without major troubles).

> > We should rather make a call for new maintainers than remove them
> > without further action... and then discover very late that we regressed
> > between etch and lenny in the user-experience point of view.
> 
>   Why very late ? have a look at the RC bug list every day like I do and
> you would know. At some point the RM team just can't NMU any broken
> package out there. It's micro-management and it doesn't scale. 

I didn't ask the RM team to do the NMU. Just to not remove the packages
and to advertise the fact that someone must take care of those because
they are part of what we wanted to provide to our users.

> So there is a removal policy, that I believe to be sane, and update-*
> matched.

As as I said, you should reconsider the policy when it comes to
packages which are installed through tasks.

For the record, the task gnome-desktop does reference update-notifier directly:
http://git.debian.org/?p=tasksel/tasksel.git;a=blob;f=tasks/gnome-desktop;h=0b4dfb59648583877fb9fd2659a9173a390865c5;hb=HEAD

And update-notifier depends on update-manager. No recommends comes into
play here. I'm sure you can improve processes and not dismiss my concern.

>   FWIW I consider that new testing users not having a broken network-*
> installed are users that have a better experience than users with fancy
> stuff that does not work (but is very fancy I assume).

Have you evaluated the level of brokenness before adding those hints?

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/