On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 10:08:04AM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote: > > Hence the need for policy to dictate to the maintainer not to allow the > > package to be removed before all other packages have transitioned. It > > usually doesn't take much more work as long as the maintainer is even > > aware of what will happen. > > It is not policy problem, it is a common sense one!
Common sense says otherwise :) You see, before we had katie and the testing scripts, such removal of orphan libraries was done manually. ("orphan" because they no longer had a source package that built them). Our experience was that packages that depended on them did not even start to get updated until after we removed the old library. As long as the old library was there, there was apparently no incentive for anyone to recompile. That's when we decided to just remove such libraries immediately, and just let unstable be broken for a while. With most libraries this works fine. There were a few libraries with so many dependencies that an "oldlibs" version was necessary -- ncurses was in that category, for example. But they were the exception, not the rule. Of course, these days we have gnome and kde depending on every library they can possibly find, and every other package depending on gnome or kde (or both, if they can manage it), so the terrain may have shifted somewhat... Richard Braakman