Bug#774889: removed packages not even part stable.... who's the maintainer?!

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hello Andreas Beckmann!

Thanks for your bug report(s) and testing.

For the case in #774889 I don't think the changes you suggest
are useful at all. The gdm package has been removed from Debian and is
not part of *stable*. If you intentionally keep it around anyway then in
my point of view you are the maintainer of it and you need to make sure
that it does not conflict with an official debian package. Requiring
that debians official gdm3 package to *for all eternity* carry conflict
avoidance is in my point of view not a realistic and useful requirement.
The upgrade path from oldstable->stable did work. The solution is to
uninstall packages you no longer want to have installed since they are
not supported after removal from the archive.

I'd argue that the severity of this bug report should be adjusted to
wishlist, if not simply closed because no real users where harmed by
this. (Can I reassign bugs to removed packages and then close them
based on the package being removed? ;P)

I'd like to hear your point of view on why this should be considered
a release critical bug.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson