GTK 4.0 [LWN.net]

GTK 4.0

Posted Dec 18, 2020 1:41 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
In reply to: GTK 4.0 by mattheww
Parent article: GTK 4.0

Normally Debian doesn't consider packages not in Debian when doing removals, since the person requestion removal usually doesn't have visibility into that.

OTOH, sometimes we get old stuff reintroduced because external things use them, for example src:libudev0-shim was recently added reintroducing libudev0 as a compat shim for libudev1.

https://github.com/archlinux/libudev0-shim
https://packages.debian.org/libudev0

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GTK 4.0

Posted Dec 18, 2020 10:27 UTC (Fri) by mattheww (guest, #108205) [Link] (1 responses)

It seems to me that Debian has something of a blind spot here. I don't
think the maintainers would consider removing, say, a COBOL compiler or
an R charting library because it had no reverse dependencies.

But when they're looking at a piece of software which historically did
have many things in the archive depending on it, it's as if there's a
default assumption that that was its only purpose.

GTK 4.0

Posted Dec 19, 2020 1:31 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Things get removed from Debian due to lack of reverse dependencies all the time. The first class of these are modules in various languages (Node/Python/Perl etc) that are often just removed by the respective language team when nothing in Debian uses them and they don't have significant popcon. The second class is things that gather an critical bug that is trivial to fix, often they will just be removed instead of fixing the bug. Unfortunately Debian QA folks are significantly deletionist, since removal is less effort in the long term than fixing issues.

I definitely agree with you that Debian has a blind spot around user feedback. Apart from popcon, we don't know how important each package is to our user-base, we don't have telemetry to automatically hear about common issues and we don't have a way to pro-actively reach all users (not just those on the mailing lists) to ask them to test issues/fixes etc, we can only react to bug reports, support requests etc.