Bug#933128: libparse-debianchangelog-perl: Unsuitable for Bullseye unless someone becomes upstream

[intrigeri]

Hi,

intrigeri at debian.org (2019-07-26):
> Therefore, at the pkg-perl BoF today at DebConf, after pondering other
> options such as orphaning this package, we decided that we don't want
> this package to be included in Bullseye (at least, maintained under
> the Perl team umbrella) unless someone else steps up and becomes its
> upstream maintainer. [...]

> libparse-debianchangelog-perl has quite a few reverse-dependencies, [...]

10 months later, we've reached the point when there's 1 single
reverse dependency left in sid: customdeb, whose maintainer promptly
agreed it can be removed at the same time as libparse-debianchangelog-perl.
All other previous reverse dependencies were ported to something else
(most often libdpkg-perl) and nobody volunteered to adopt it upstream.

Thanks a lot to everyone who participated in making this happen :)

In testing there's another reverse-dependency: aptitude, which has
been ported away from libparse-debianchangelog-perl in 0.8.13-1.

So, once aptitude >= 0.8.13-1 has migrated to testing, I think it'll
be time to ensure libparse-debianchangelog-perl itself is removed from
testing, which was the goal of the whole operation.

But:

> Note that libparse-debianchangelog-perl is on the list of key
> packages¹ so this RC bug won't trigger the autoremoval machinery for
> it, nor for any of its reverse dependencies.
>
> [1] https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/key_packages.yaml.cgi

libparse-debianchangelog-perl is on the list of key packages because
it's installed on many machines ("popcon"). This will prevent the
autoremoval machinery from removing it from testing.

So, once aptitude >= 0.8.13-1 has migrated to testing, we'll need to
ask (presumably the release team) for libparse-debianchangelog-perl to
lose its "key package" status, so the autoremoval machinery can remove
it from testing due to this very RC bug.

Cheers!