Hello. At the risk of stating the obvious, I'm going to reply to this message from the author, since it seems he reads the bugs reported to Debian.
On Thu, 31 Mar 2016, Jamie Zawinski wrote: > In the time it took me to read your whine, you could have upgraded > your incredibly-out-of-date computer and saved us all the grief. Actually, that's not necessarily the case. Packages in Debian stable only change when they have security bugs (via security.debian.org), or (in certain cases) bugs of serious severity, of the type that make them unsuitable for release. Just "being old" is not a bug in itself, so it's not a reason good enough to upgrade, or a reason to ask the user that he/she has to upgrade. Upgrading *all* the packages in Debian is quite easy: "apt-get upgrade". You are absolutely right that it would take very little time to do that, but not so right if you blidnly assume that a new package somehow "has" to be available when doing "apt-get upgrade" when you are using Debian stable. Because stable is frozen and does not change except for security fixes and very serious bugs. Now, let's see what's wrong with old versions. If you don't want to receive bugs about old versions, we understand that completely. We don't like to receive bugs about old versions either. The perfect bug submitter is the one that looks for the latest version to confirm that it's not fixed yet. To not bother upstream authors with reports about old versions, we have our own bug tracking system. In theory, bugs about old versions would never be forwarded to the author (via email, I mean). > I find your request to be obnoxious and I wish to not have read it, > but sadly we don't always get what we want. If, as it seems, the author voluntarily subscribes to our bug tracking system to receive all the bugs reported to Debian, that's fine (in fact, the best upstream maintainers are the ones that do that). But you can't then complain that you have to read bugs about old version, that would be quite contradictory indeed. Subscribing to a package or to a bug is like a mailing list, it's either all or nothing. If bugs about old version really bother you, you could just ignore them. Nobody will ask you to fix something that it's already fixed. Now, let's see why this warning message is not the way to go. I have more than 1300 packages installed in the system, and I suspect that most Debian users have a lot more. If each and every of those packages sent me a warning just because they are "old", Debian stable would become unusable and definitely not nice. And we don't want that, so I also second that this warning message should be removed from the version in stable as well. Thanks.
