Three packages that should be removed from universe

On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 05:45:44PM -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> The packages winesetuptk and xwine need to be removed from universe.  If
> I had my way, they would even be removed from the Breezy universe
> repository.  They simply don't work anymore, are completely obsoleted by
> the use of winecfg, are no longer developed, and only confuse people
> trying to install Wine.  I remember this getting talked about earlier,
> but I think that was before we had the morgue so it must have gotten
> overlooked while I was absent.
[...]
> I added them to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MorgueCandidates however after
> some discussion in IRC I don't believe that the Morgue is actually being
> used, and that perhaps mailing the list would be a better idea.

OK, disregarding specific issues about the packages you mention for the
moment, there's substantial confusion about the morgue here, and I
thought I'd try to clear it up.

The morgue is a directory on the master archive where packages are moved
when they're removed from the archive proper, basically because we're
paranoid and try not to actually delete anything unless we absolutely
have to. It has always existed, and removals have always been possible;
there is no such thing as "before we had the morgue" within the lifetime
of the Ubuntu archive.

morgue.ubuntu.com was, for a while, a publicly-viewable mirror of the
morgue. It has not been updated for some time due to various issues
(mostly disk space I think, although that's just from memory).

For some reason people seem to have got into the habit of talking about
the morgue when what they really mean is that the package should be
removed from the archive. I think this is unnecessary and unhelpful
jargon, and that people should simply ask for packages to be removed
rather than talking about the morgue. As I explained above, the term
"morgue" has a couple of slightly different meanings in the context of
Ubuntu, and the term's use seems to cause confusion more than anything
else. Could we please retire this piece of jargon except when explicitly
referring to looking for saved copies of packages that have been removed
from the archive?

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]