packages removed from Debian are not always removed from Ubuntu

[Michael Banck]

On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 10:03:24AM +0100, Dick Davies wrote:
> On 09/08/06, Lucas Nussbaum <lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net> wrote:
> > It seems that many packages which were removed from Debian are not
> > removed from Ubuntu. Is somebody working on this specific task ?
> >
> > Example source packages are kmatplot, gtk-smooth-engine, kgeography
> >
> > If Debian removed them, it probably had a very good reason to do so, and
> > we probably want to do the same.
> 
> Debian remove packages for political/licensing reasons. It doesn't follow
> Ubuntu will always take the same stance (fortunately).

This is quite rarely the cause - those packages do not tend to get
included in Debian in the first place.

If you look at the reasons for the removals of the above quoted
packages, you will find:

| I propose to remove kmatplot:
| - Orphaned;
| - Only in unstable, never in stable;
| - Has a do-not-release rc bug since last April;
| - Dead upstream;
| - Some alternative available (qmatplot).

| Please remove gtk-smooth-engine (source and binaries) from the
| archive.  The gtk2-engines package supersedes gtk2-engines-smooth, and
| no one is willing to maintain a package building only gtk-engines-smooth.

| Removed the following packages from unstable:
| kgeography |      0.4-4 | source
| ------------------- Reason -------------------
| [rene] obsolete source package

All of those look like valid reason that they should get removed from
Ubuntu as well, IMHO.


Michael