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

[Andreas Beckmann]

On 2015-02-05 19:21, Andreas Henriksson wrote:
> 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

I do not care about gdm. I do not care about gdm3. I do care about QA.
I'm looking for upgrade paths that could get our users into trouble.

gdm3/jessie takes over a filename from gdm/squeeze, so it needs to add
Conflicts+Replaces. gdm3/wheezy and gdm/squeeze were co-installable (I
have no clue whether gdm was still functional), since there was no
declared direct or indirect conflict.

> that debians official gdm3 package to *for all eternity* carry conflict
> avoidance is in my point of view not a realistic and useful requirement.

There is no need to carry this conflict for more than one stable release.

> 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.

No, keeping around the old packages is intentional in my tests to see
whether they cause trouble later on.

> 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.

It is an upgrade issue on a straightforward upgrade path.
And the fix is trivial.

Andreas