[DRE-maint] Bug#924409: removing hiera from debian? or do not ship with buster

[Antoine Beaupre]

Package: hiera
Version: 3.2.0-2
Severity: serious

I see that Hiera in Puppet is at version 3.2.0 in buster. That's at
least two minor versions behind upstream, which is (unofficially) at
3.5:

https://github.com/puppetlabs/hiera/releases

That said, Hiera itself is deprecated as a standalone system: Hiera 5
has been part of Puppet since 4.9:

https://puppet.com/docs/hiera/3.3/index.html

The Hiera README on GitHub says the same:

https://github.com/puppetlabs/hiera/blob/master/README.md

"This project is deprecated in favor of Hiera version 5 which is
implementation in Puppet."

Since Buster will likely ship with Puppet 5.5 (or later), it doesn't
seem to make sense to ship Hiera in buster and it should be
removed. It could also be removed from unstable as well, but I wanted
to checkin with maintainers here first before filing a formal removal.

Thanks for your work!

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental'), (1, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=fr_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=fr_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=fr_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages hiera depends on:
ii  ruby             1:2.5.1
ii  ruby-deep-merge  1.1.1-1
ii  ruby-json        2.1.0+dfsg-2+b1

hiera recommends no packages.

Versions of packages hiera suggests:
pn  mcollective-common  <none>
pn  puppet-common       <none>

-- debconf-show failed