Package: git
Version: 1:2.11.0-3+deb9u1
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
please reconsider the decision in #866059 to stop packaging git-archimport.
It makes it unnecessary cumbersome to recover tla data from backups and
deprives git
from one of the components that its upstream maintainers consider worthwhile
distributing.
Even if tla is not shipped in debian, I see no reason not to provide the
archimport helper in git. Should tla have security issues (which we do not
know, since the issue seems to be merely that it has not received patches
in the last years), the git helper alone is totally innocuous.
With the helper in git, to recover data from backups that may include tla
archives, it can be enough to manually build tla and run it in a "controlled"
environment. Without the helper in git, one needs to locally rebuild git too,
duplicating stuff that is already in the official packages.
I think that, at most, the helper should be patched to not depend on tla and
provide an informative notice if tla is not in the system.
Please, also consider the timing of the decision. You say that archimport will
disappear from 2019, but following your decision, it is disappearing right now
from ubuntu.
*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***
* What led up to the situation?
* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
ineffective)?
* What was the outcome of this action?
* What outcome did you expect instead?
*** End of the template - remove these template lines ***
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 9.1
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: armel (armv5tel)
Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-3-marvell
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_US:en (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Versions of packages git depends on:
ii dpkg 1.18.24
ii git-man 1:2.11.0-3+deb9u1
ii libc6 2.24-11+deb9u1
ii libcurl3-gnutls 7.52.1-5
ii liberror-perl 0.17024-1
ii libexpat1 2.2.0-2+deb9u1
ii libpcre3 2:8.39-3
ii perl 5.24.1-3+deb9u1
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.8.dfsg-5
Versions of packages git recommends:
ii less 481-2.1
ii openssh-client [ssh-client] 1:7.4p1-10+deb9u1
ii patch 2.7.5-1+b2
ii rsync 3.1.2-1
Versions of packages git suggests:
ii gettext-base 0.19.8.1-2
pn git-arch <none>
pn git-cvs <none>
pn git-daemon-run | git-daemon-sysvinit <none>
pn git-doc <none>
pn git-el <none>
pn git-email <none>
pn git-gui <none>
pn git-mediawiki <none>
pn git-svn <none>
pn gitk <none>
pn gitweb <none>
-- no debconf information
