* Andrey Rahmatullin <w...@debian.org> [210527 10:38]: > On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 10:10:15AM -0400, Marvin Renich wrote: > > If transitional packages either had a debtag or a control file field > > that identified them, then tools like deborphan could easily be made to > > find and remove them > Oh they already do (both the oldlibs section and the "dummy" description > substring are supported by deborphan), but deborphan needs to be run > manually.
oldlibs has a different purpose: to identify libraries that are outdated, but that the user might want for various reasons (e.g. non-Debian software that requires an older library version). Using text in the description seems, uh, kludgey at best. Something more specific and canonical would be an immense improvement. Just looking through oldlibs makes it obvious that not all transitional packages use the same wording in the description, and searching for the specific word "transitional" has a non-negligible chance of a false positive. ...Marvin
