Ubuntu Wiki

• Launchpad Entry: foundations-m-package-culling

• Created: 3 May 2010

• Contributors:

• Packages affected: many

Summary

Find and aggressively deal with packages whose merges have been lagging for several releases.

Release Note

Not particularly user-visible; no release note necessary.

Rationale

Slow merges damage our reputation with Debian, and lead us to fall behind on bug-fixes.

Design

Lagging merges

We can divide problematic packages into various classes:

• Permanently forked from upstream, no intention to remerge:
  • *Rename*
• Permanently forked from Debian but not upstream, no intention to remerge:
  • *Blacklist*
• Debian derived from Ubuntu:
  • Generally *blacklist*, but it's worth keeping an eye on the Debian package
• We just haven't got round to merging
  • *Merge* for Maverick!

To find the packages we need to pay attention to, we will acquire a snapshot index of Debian unstable at Karmic DebianImportFreeze. Any package with a newer version in that snapshot than currently in Maverick, and that is not blacklisted, is an important target for merging.

Lagging removals

We will look at the set of packages that have been removed from Debian, but that we may have kept because we had an Ubuntu delta. During discussion at UDS, it was not clear to the participants whether our standard bulk removal procedures for this situation preserve packages with an Ubuntu delta, so we will look into this. If they do not, it seems possible that it may be worth modifying them to keep packages with an Ubuntu delta for safety, but in that case we will need to keep an eye on the list of pending removals on a regular basis; we will investigate this.

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