686-smp kernels old?

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 10:19:26AM -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Shawn McMahon wrote:
> > It may not be a standard English word, but it's jargon in several
> > disciplines, including, evidently, Ubuntu:
> > 
> > https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/prelude-nids/+bug/33216
> 
> English is a living language, and that includes all sorts of developments
> around words for "death".  While it's possible to give words any meaning at
> all, common usage (not "grammar", which throws fits at using nouns as
> verbs) would suggest that "morgued" could only mean something like "sent to
> the morgue".  Since "morgue" has been in the language for years with the
> meaning of "archive" (as in "newspaper morgue"), I have no problem with
> it :-)

I understand that, but the problem is that that's not actually what
people mean when they use the term.

In the context of Ubuntu, the morgue is indeed where packages go when
they die. However, what people generally actually want is simply for the
package to be removed from Dapper; all that happens when we do that is
that the package stops showing up in the Packages and/or Sources files
under dists/dapper. The actual files are moved to the morgue after a
"stay of execution" (currently one day, I think), provided that they are
not in use in any other release. Often enough, the package hasn't
changed since Breezy (say), so its files will still be in use, and so it
won't move to the morgue until we stop supporting Breezy.

"Please move this package to the morgue" (expanding out the grammar)
could easily be understood by an overworked ftpmaster to mean "this
package violates copyrights and we're being sued; please remove this
package from all releases, purge it immediately from archive.ubuntu.com,
and burn the pieces", which is not necessarily an implausible request,
and is often about the only way to actually fulfil the request as asked.
Obviously we'd raise our collective eyebrows at that and check such a
thing a few times before actually doing it, but still, why create
confusion where none needs to exist? The simple term "remove" is
long-established as the verb for getting rid of a package from a release
(http://ftp-master.debian.org/removals.txt), and the archive
administrators will understand what you mean when you use that term.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]