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Hi, everybody, I'm Eric Doland.

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I'm the automake maintainer,[br]among other things.

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Today I'm going to talk about removing obsolete packages.

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This is meant to be a BOF.

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I only have sixteen slides,

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so I'm going to talk about my experiences

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in removing old versions of automake.

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Please feel free to interrupt with questions

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or criticisms or comments as we go.

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Hopefully with a bit of discussion about how to do this better in the future,

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or maybe not better, we'll see.

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So just to set the context a little bit,

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automake in Debian,

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I started maintaining it a really long time ago.

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It's making me feel old. 2002.

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This was around the time that automake 1.6 came out, I think.

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One of the problems automake has is

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that new releases of it usually have incompatibilities

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with backwards-compatible completely.

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There's various reasons why this is,

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it provides a very weird interface,

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because you're basically embedding things inside make files,

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and it's hard to control the API of a make file.

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Back in the day, there was, for a very long time,

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automake 1.4, and that just sort of worked,

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and then, automake 1.5 was introduced,

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Debian upgraded to automake 1.5, and lots of packages broke.

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So what ended up happening is that automake 1.5 got moved into its own package,

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and automake 1.4 was automake package.

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Nowadays, the older versions get moved into their own packages,

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and generally, the currently released version--the most up-to-date version--

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is the automake package.

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This has some downsides, because it's not necessarily fully backwards-compatible,

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but this is usually what people want.

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They want the latest version of automake, and they don't want to have to install

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a new package any time a new version of automake comes out.

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All the automake packages provide an alternative

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so that you can have your /usr/bin/automake

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be exactly which automake you want it to be.

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The priority of that alternative usually means that the latest version of automake

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is the one automatically selected, but of course, you can override that.

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There's a note here that, depending on automake directly, is a little risky,

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because fancy automake files, new versions of automake, might break you, potentially.

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Anyway, this is not the automake BOF, this is just a little context

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about why automake is what it is in Debian.

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So there's problems with this, because these backwards-compatible issues, as I said,

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were packaging all the versions of automake.

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Each new version was getting a new package, basically,

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and we've gone through a lot of automake packages over the years.

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I didn't count them up, but it looks like almost close to ten, I guess,

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which is a lot of packages you have to deal with.

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People will depend on these individual packages, for whatever reason,

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and then getting them out of the system, when they become old, is troublesome.

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As of the wheezy release, we had four different automakes in the wheezy release.

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So we had what the old, old--as you can see, 1.4, 1.9, 1.10, and 1.11--

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and they say that at one point we're going to have five different versions of automake,

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which is a lot of versions of automake.

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You can also see that the 1.4 version was released in 2002,

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when I started maintaining this stuff, so it's really old.

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No one should be using it, and no one should have been using it for the last ten years,

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but we sort of kept it around because people were like

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"oh, maybe there's old software that, you know, still depends on automake 1.4."

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Um, yeah.

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This is crazy. [br]There are too many versions of automake.

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No one really wants them. So, I started out on this mission

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to bring us down to, hopefully, one or two versions of automake for the next release.

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I've been doing this over the last year, and I was makign these slides

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and I was thinking about, it sort of had these weird parallels

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with some things I'd read about, so now I present to you

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the five stages of removing an obsolete package from Debian.

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The first stage is denial.

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[laughter]

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"If I send mail to debian-devel asking everyone to very nicely

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move off of these old versions of automake, they'll just do it, right?

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I mean, doesn't everyone agree that that's what will happen?

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Yeah, so that's what I started out by doing.

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I'm going to talk a little bit about the tools and stuff that I used in this process,

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so this is sort of technical, and sort of procedural.

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If you've got questions about either side, just shoot up your hand.

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The first thing you do, or the first thing I did, is that I used grep-dctrl to figure out

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which packages were build dependent on automake.

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Automake basically has no actual binary dependencies, it's all build dependencies.

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There were one hundred and sixty-nine packages--source packages.

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That's a lot, but in Debian scale, it's not that much. It should be fine, right?

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Then, I used the dlist tool to turn that list of packages into a list of maintainers,

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with their packages. It's a very nice tool for just ??

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Then, I sent out an email debian-devel saying,

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"Here's my plan: I want to get rid of these old versions of automake.

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Here are the packages that are build-dependent on them.

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Please, do your part and fix this.

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I sent that mail out on May 27, 2013, so before last DebConf, which I was not at.

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Stage Two: Anger.

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People aren't fixing these things!

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I'm going to have to actually do something other than send an email. All right, fine.

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The next thing I did, to try to encourage people again to make this move,

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Lintian has this really nice facility. One of tests is actually--there's a list of obsolete packages.

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If you put your package in that list,

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lintian will complain any time anyone depends on that package,

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to try to force maintainers that are paying attention,

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that they should't actually be depending on these packages.

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That's good. It's cheap to do. Just sent the patch to lintian.

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I don't see any reason they wouldn't take it if it made sense.

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Now, I have to file bugs. People don't read debian-devel.

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It's sort of, it's fair I guess. So I basically just went through the list of packages I had,

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with a simple substitution script, so now it mailed a mail that was like

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"Please stop depending on automake blank." with a very boiler-plate thing saying

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"this is why we're getting rid of these old versions of automake"

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and I sent that off to BTS. Which is really easy, right? Because BTS is just email.

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So you can just do that. You can file a bunch of bugs that way.

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I should note that my initial email was a proposal for this mass bug filing, as well,

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which you're supposed to do as part of the procedure of sending out mass bug filings.

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When I did this, I had to file one hundred and seventeen bugs.

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There's fifty two packages that got fixed between me sending my initial email

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and the bugs. So that's good, I shouldn't be that angry, maybe.

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I did wait four months between these two events, though, so there's plenty of time.

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The other thing I used was using BTS user tags, to track all of these bugs very easily easily

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using this automake clean-up 2013 tag. I added the date because

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I knew this would not be the last automake clean-up that I would have to do,

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so I keep these separate.

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Always good to date your work if you think you might have to repeat it.

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Yeah, no, I did not finish in 2013. I started in 2013.

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It should've been automake clean-up 2015 or something, if I wanted the finish date.

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All right, so stage three. Bargaining.

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Okay, so, I'm past the anger stage, and now I'm like "okay, I've filed all these bugs,

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but not much is happening, so let me just fix this for you.

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I'll give you the exact fix on how to much to the newer version of automake.

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Here's the patch. Just apply it and upload your package.

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I've done all the work; I've done all the hard stuff."

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So, before I even did this, thirty four packages were fixed

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without supplying a patch. I began the patching in late October of 2013

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and--this is the hard part, this is the part that's tough to automate--in many cases,

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just switching to the new version of automake worked, and then it was easy,

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but that was maybe 50% of the cases.

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I didn't keep good statistics about how tough this was exactly,

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but in a lot of cases, I had to fiddle with the build system,

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or a lot of build rules would run automake itself,

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instead of using dh-autoreconf.

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There was a lot of actual fiddling with packages, trying to get them to build,

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and then just waiting to build these things, which can take a very long time,

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to test that this worked. So this is a lot of actual, tough work.

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What else? I used pbuilder to do the builds and then if I successfully built something,

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with the new version of automake,[br]I would just mail off a patch

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to the existing bug, in BTS, and flip the patch tag, saying "here's the patch."

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So I thought, okay, at this point, you know, there's patches out there

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for almost all of these problems.

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There should be a wave of uploads and everything should be great.

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Stage Four: Depression.

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That's not what happened. I was pretty much on my own.

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The responsible maintainers have already fixed this problem.

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So we're into this, sort of, long tale of people who don't care,

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or people who are too busy to deal with their packages or do anything here.

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Now I have to upload NMUs. I started this in late January, I think

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