Removals (wiki)

Manual

Sometimes packages just need removing entirely, because they are no longer required. This can be done using the remove-package client-side tool:

$ ./remove-package -m "reason for removal" konserve

By default this removes the named source and binaries, to remove just a binary use -b:

$ ./remove-package -m "NBS" -b konserve

“NBS” is a common short-hand meaning that the binary is “No-longer Built by the Source”.

To remove just a source, use -S.

The tool tells you what it’s going to do, and asks for confirmation before doing it, so it’s reasonably safe to get the wrong options and say N.

Blacklisting

If you remove source packages which are in Debian, and they are not meant to ever come back, add it to the blacklist in lp:~ubuntu-archive/+junk/sync-blacklist, document the reason, and bzr commit it with an appropriate changelog. This will avoid getting the package back to source NEW in the next round of auto-syncs from Debian.

Removals in Debian

From time to time we should remove packages that were removed in Debian, to avoid accumulating unmaintained packages. This client-side tool (from ubuntu-archive-tools) will interactively go through the removals and ask for confirmation:

$ ./process-removals

Please note that we do need to keep some packages that were removed in Debian (e.g. firefox, since we did not do the firefox -> iceweasel renaming).

Failed SRUs

If a package should be removed from -proposed, use the remove-package tool (from ubuntu-archive-tools) to remove source and binaries, e.g. for the libreoffice package in xenial-proposed:

$ ./remove-package -m "SRU abandoned (verification-failed)" -s xenial-proposed libreoffice

NBS

Sometimes binary packages are Not Built by any Source (NBS) any more. This usually happens with library SONAME changes, package renames, etc. Those need to be removed from the archive from time to time, and right before a release, to ensure that the entire archive can be rebuilt by current sources.

Such packages are detected by archive-cruft-check. This tool does not check for reverse dependencies, though, so you should use checkrdepends -b for checking if it is safe to actually remove NBS packages from the archive.

Look at the half-hourly generated NBS report which shows all NBS packages, their reverse dependencies, and a copy-and-paste-able command to clean up the “safe” ones.

The rest needs to be taken care of by developers, by doing transition uploads for library SONAME changes, updating build dependencies, etc. The remaining files will list all the packages which still need the package in question.

Please refrain from removing NBS kernel packages for old ABIs until debian-installer and the seeds have been updated, otherwise daily builds of alternate and server CDs will be made uninstallable.