Polling for opinions on removing vm-builder, sandbox-upgrader and auto-upgrade-tester

[Christian Ehrhardt]

Hi,
due to a few recent bugs in ubuntu-vm-builder I got reminded that whenever
vmbuilder comes up, people feel bad and have to excuse a lot as it is
essentially un-maintained.
All use-cases people seemed to care about are replaced by uvtool [1] which
is far more widely used.

I happened to realize that it was already tried to be removed for the same
reasons [2] in late 2013.
It was un-maintained then and hasn't changed.

There was a short flicker of an upstream community [3], but not enough to
consider it maintained at the moment. If this really comes to life we can
add it in later releases.

The reasons preventing the removal last time were reverse dependencies from
"sandbox-upgrader" and "auto-upgrade-tester".
These are Ubuntu only as well and have no reverse dependencies on their own.
Furthermore it seems their former (assumed) users are no more utilizing
them [4]

Therefore this is a final poll for objections, before pushing harder on the
removal of the whole set of:
- vmbuilder
- sandbox-upgrader
- auto-upgrade-tester

[1]: https://launchpad.net/uvtool
[2]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/vm-builder/+bug/1260062
[3]: https://github.com/newroco/vmbuilder
[4]: https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2017/07/13/%23ubuntu-devel.html#t20:43

P.S. this is not just looking for an easy reply-to-all:"yes please keep
it". As Serge phrased it so well 3 years ago the alternative is "someone
who has the time and technical ability to maintain the package (in past and
current releases)"

-- 
Christian Ehrhardt
Software Engineer, Ubuntu Server
Canonical Ltd
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