Tracking removals of reverse-dependencies from devel-proposed

[Steve Langasek]

Matthias and I had a conversation on IRC today about how to handle packages
that are stuck indefinitely in devel-proposed until some dependent package
is fixed.  Up to now we have largely been leaving them in -proposed; this
now makes them one of the largest groupings of unreleasable packages in
-proposed, including most of the packages that have been waiting longest.

Leaving non-actionable packages in devel-proposed for long periods of time
(these packages are non-actionable because they are not broken but depend on
some other package that is) makes developers less productive when trying to
identify packages in update_excuses to work on.  But because these packages
are themselves also not buggy, removing them means they disappear from
Ubuntu and don't come back when the underlying issue is fixed.

To square this circle, Matthias and I agreed that if such packages are
removed, we should document them somewhere so that we can (periodically,
perhaps semi-automatically) review that list and re-add packages as
appropriate.

This list now lives in the sync-blacklist branch:

  https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-archive/+junk/sync-blacklist/view/head:/extra-removals.txt

Archive admins should feel free to make use of it.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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