Recent discussion about package removals on debian-devel prompted me to
look at debian-qa usertagged bugs.
For context, libgetopt-mixed-perl was declared obsolete by its upstream
maintainer more than a decade ago (2007), because Getopt::Long grew
equivalent functionality in Perl 5.005 (but the upstream release that
added deprecation warnings never made it into Debian because it's
effectively unmaintained in Debian). Removal from Debian was proposed
in 2009. I think it's well past the time this package should be removed
from Debian, before a well-meaning maintainer of some other software
accidentally depends on it (as dh-dist-zilla briefly did).
On Mon, 04 Jul 2016 at 13:47:57 +0200, Axel Beckert wrote:
> I've now also checked with "dak rm -Rn libgetopt-mixed-perl" on
> mirror.ftp-master.debian.org:
>
> Checking reverse dependencies...
> # Broken Depends:
> cil: cil
> fusionforge: fusionforge-plugin-globalsearch
>
> # Broken Build-Depends:
> cil: libgetopt-mixed-perl
I've rechecked this. cil no longer Depends on libgetopt-mixed-perl;
fusionforge-plugin-globalsearch still does; and cil still Build-Depends
on libgetopt-mixed-perl due to an oversight in the previous attempt to
drop the dependency.
I've opened Severity: important bugs against cil and fusionforge,
with a warning that I'll raise the fusionforge one to RC when cil is
fixed. fusionforge is already RC-buggy and absent from stretch and
buster, so no great loss there.
If anyone feels strongly about this package being removed, feel free to
escalate the severity of the various bugs involved.
Regards,
smcv
