Bug#1086351: Removal notice: obsolete

[Ilias Tsitsimpis]

Hi Hilko,

I opened this bug because I wasn't sure if anyone from the Debian
Haskell Team is still working on this package. I have been opening such
bugs for the last couple of years (see [1] for the current list) and
seems to be working pretty well in order to coordinate between us and
remove unused packages.

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?which=maint&data=pkg-haskell-maintainers%40lists.alioth.debian.org&archive=no&pend-exc=done&sev-inc=serious

It's good to know that you still care for and maintain this package.
Please go ahead and close this bug report.

Let me also answer to your questions about why I list those items as
reasons to remove a package maintained by the Debian Haskell Team.

On Wed, Oct 30, 2024 at 03:26PM, Hilko Bengen wrote:
> >   * It has no rev dependencies
> 
> The compiler itself is considered stable upstream and I'd argue that the
> number of reverse dependencies is not necessarily a measure of its
> usefulness.

Agreed. Most of the packages maintained by the Debian Haskell Team are
libraries, and this is why "no rev dependencies" is included in my
template.

> >   * It FTBFS with the latest Haskell libraries available in Debian
> 
> … which has been reported a few days ago at best. I'm aware of the
> FTBFS, I haven't had time to investigate yet.

The reason we didn't caught this earlier is because elm-compiler is not
part of our package-plan [2]. Can you please add elm-compiler there?

[2] https://salsa.debian.org/haskell-team/package-plan

> >   * Seems unmaintained; Last upload more than 5 years ago
> 
> No. According to debian/changelog, the last upload by myself was on Nov
> 1 2023 – almost one year ago. You may have been referring to the
> upstream project which hasn't seen updates since 2019; for that, see
> above.

I was referring to the upstream project. There has not been a release in
the last 5 years, and now we are at a place where this project doesn't
build with newer versions of the libraries that are available in Debian.
This made me think this project is abandoned upstream.

It looks like I am not the first one to assume this project is dead:

  * https://github.com/elm/compiler/issues/2308
  * https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/commit/d4b6e1a0072626b2980f0ff1280267d07a2b78aa

> >   * It's not part of the latest Stackage LTS
> 
> How is this relevant to what packages are allowed to be distributed with
> as part of Debian?

This has nothing to do with packages that are allowed to be distributed
as part of Debian. This is about packages maintained by the Debian
Haskell Team. The Debian Haskell Team follows Stackage LTS releases for
the packages we maintain, and we generally avoid packaging anything
outside Stackage because it tends to break with every new Stackage
release.

> >   * Newer versions are not uploaded to Hackage
> 
> How is this relevant?

This has to do with easy of maintenance again. Our tooling (e.g.,
package-plan) rely on Haskell packages being part of Hackage.

As I said above, since you are willing to continue maintaining this
package, please disregard any of the above and close this bug report.

Best,

-- 
Ilias