[DRE-maint] Bug#796497: reconsidering the removal of ruby-hpricot

[Antonio Terceiro]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 06:26:06PM +0200, Christian Hofstaedtler wrote:
> Package: ruby-hpricot
> Version: 0.8.6-5
> Severity: serious
> Justification: obsolete
> 
> ruby-hpricot is obsolete.
> 
> Upstream has this to say:
> 
> > # Hpricot is over.
> > 
> > After years of lack of a proper maintainer for one of why's jewels, it has been
> > decided to finally close the book on hpricot. Most users have migrated to alternatives
> > and there is simply no time or energy to continue with the current codebase.
> > 
> > If you feel that you have the time and wish to take it over, I suggest you instead
> > think about making the hpricot-like API within nokogiri 100% compatible, that is a better
> > use of your time.
> > 
> > But if you still feel like "No damnit, I wanna work on hpricot itself still!" then fork
> > this repo and start work. Send @evanphx or @nicksieger a message if you feel like you
> > want to take over the gem name with new releases under the hpricot name.
> > 
> > Thanks to \_why for all the fun. We'll never forget it.
> 
> If your package depends on ruby-hpricot, please move away from it
> immediately.
> 
> We're not going to have ruby-hpricot in stretch.

ruby-hpricot has now only 2 reverse dependencies: ruby-ronn and
ruby-fast-fs. However, the number of packages build-depending on
ruby-ronn only grows, and is currently at 54¹

¹ comitup coquelicot cura-engine dbab elektra foodcritic foremancli
  gazebo git-extras haproxyctl ignition-math2 ignition-math2
  ignition-transport ignition-transport jq maim npm pacapt pgloader
  python-lua qiime r10k ruby-coveralls ruby-ghi seqprep shapelib slt
  unburden-home-dir vcsh comitup coquelicot dbab elektra foodcritic
  foremancli gazebo git-extras haproxyctl ignition-math2
  ignition-transport jq maim npm pacapt pgloader r10k ruby-coveralls
  ruby-ghi seqprep shapelib unburden-home-dir vcsh pgcharts pycsw

ruby-hpricot is indeed dead upstream, but so is a lot of software in
Debian. Also, being dead upstream does not mean not being useful, or
necessarily being broken.

So I think we should give up on removing ruby-hpricot until at least one
of the following happen:

- ruby-ronn gets rewritten to not use ruby-hpricot (unlikely since ronn
  is dead upstream itself)
- something else can replace ruby-ronn and we manage to make reverse
  (build) dependencies switch to it.
- ruby-hpricot gets broken by a future update to Ruby in a way that is
  unfixable and we have no other option.
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