deleting old patched packages from our repository

[Mattia Rizzolo]

Hi gang,

In the past some people expressed concerns about deleting old packages
from our repository on alioth.  ISTR the motivation was somewhere on the
lines of "being able to reproduce old builds", or so.
That's why in the past I used to check for builds done with an older
version, reschedule those builds, and once no package had been built
with that particular version of a package move that package to
/home/groups/reproducible/htdocs/old-packages.

Currently we have a gcc-6 in our repository, making the above quite
harder, not to mention that currently querying .buildinfo is still
harder than it ought to be.

Besides, I've never heard of anybody needing those old packages to
"reproduce old builds", making the original complaint kinda moot.

ATM, the old-packages directories contains 16 GB of source and binaries
packages; I consider keeping so many unused files also disrespectful
towards the other users of a shared system like alioth's, which has been
constantly running out of space for years (and DSA "keeps" giving more
disk) and to Debian's backup system.


Therefore, I'd like to delete that directory, and also change the
"policy" to "move old packages to ../old-packages" to "delete old
packages" when they are superseded by a newer version.


Comments welcome.

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
more about me:  https://mapreri.org                             : :'  :
Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri                  `. `'`
Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia  `-
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