The usual situation

Posted Jan 15, 2026 4:04 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
Parent article: Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky

This situation of software being broken by newer versions of dependencies comes up a lot in Debian (and presumably every distro) over the years, the usual result is that the relevant packages just get removed, usually without any equivalent or better replacement and everyone just has to deal with it. Personally I just have hundreds of non-updatable libraries and packages still installed, plus a text file with a list of packages that I was forced to remove with no replacement. Sometimes there are adequate alternatives, or forks that continue maintenance of the obsolete projects, but they almost always stay out of distros.

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The usual situation

Posted Jan 15, 2026 4:11 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

Yep. I run a few mailing lists on Mailman 2. That's unmaintained now in favour of Mailman 3, but I don't like Mailman 3. It's way more complicated and I don't want to invest the time needed to migrate my lists and check that everything's OK. Also, I run the Sendmail MTA (for legacy reasons...) and the Mailman 3 documentation states: "The core Mailman developers generally do not use Sendmail, so experience is limited. Any and all contributions are welcome! There is one such contribution on GitHub and another in comments at this issue."

Not too reassuring.

So for now, I install Mailman 2.x from source. But it requires Python 2.x and I'm dreading the day Debian drops that. 🙁