> Add also that packages can reach their End-Of-Life time. Assuming the package has no real bugs (that is, it is still usable with the bugs it has), when will it reach its end-of-life time? I would say it only reaches it when no one uses it any more. As long as there is even a single user, the package is alive. This is again one of Debian's advantages: you still have that old good software packaged in the official distribution although it is no longer fancy and sexy. SuSE, for example, does not have, which is bad. (No offence to SuSE, but I have not touched any other distribution than Debian and SuSE for a couple of years.) I do not think there is any reason to remove such packages. We should, and I think this is what the original posting did, discuss packages which have important bugs AND are poorly maintained (i.e. important bugs not being fixed or upstream not followed) or abandoned (i.e. the maintainer is mia or upstream has abandoned it). If the package is still usable, there is no reason to remove it. Adding a field like "Deprecated: Rather use package-X" or putting them in Extra could help people to find alternatives if they do not want these oldies.
> So, no more upstream maintainer(s), no more active development and more valid > alternatives to them. This is unfortunately true for so much pkgs. This is exactly what I want to oppose. If a package is no longer developed, what is wrong with it? I suppose ls or rm have not been developed for a while but are still very useful. (I admit, they are not packages, but they are valid examples: even though the programs are old and not very much developed lately, they are still being used! This is even more true for packages used in scientific research: they are very often developed for a single research group and packaged just in case someone else wants to use them, too. They do what they were designed to do, but are no longer developed. It would be a shame if these were dropped. Having a lot (of packages) to choose from is a priviledge of Debian users - let us stick to that. You do not need to install packages you do not intend to use - if you do not know what some old package is for, why install it at all? -- ----------------------------------------------- | Juha Jäykkä, [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/ | -----------------------------------------------