Cleaning Out The Archive

It has been brought up more than once that Ubuntu has a lot of packages, over 14000 of them in fact, and nearly a thousand of them are Ubuntu specific. To help reduce the number of useless, old, superseded, and generally unwanted packages in the archive, a strike team of dedicated MOTUs are needed to look at current packages, and determine if they should be removed, and if so, file the requite Request for Removal packages, and follow up on them.

Justification

The justification for the formation of this team comes from the concerns on the amount of useless packages growing in the archive. A lot of packages such as old gcc's, firefox2, and so forth are cluttering up the place, and making maintaining the archive more difficult for both archive admins, and MOTUs. By being able to locate and find these packages, and start the wheels in motion towards removing them from the archive, we get a smaller, cleaner, well oiled archive.

Membership

Membership is open to all MOTUs. Non-MOTUs can be sponsored into the group by any MOTU. The reason behind this is that there is a fine line between cruft and just old packages, and being experienced in such matters is a pre-requisite for handling these types of removal requests. In addition, writing the requests themselves requires a relatively strong knowledge of Ubuntu packaging and procedures.

Launchpad Group

https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-cruft-busters

Current Admins:

• Michael Casadevall (NCommander)

Procedures

To keep people working on the same page, the cruft busters bugs page will be used for handling coordination of bugs. The general procedure is as follows.

1. Open a bug for a package that should be cruft-busted (aka firefox2).

• - This bug should have any rdepends, and the rational for removal

2. Mark the bug In Progress and assign it to yourself if you wish to work on it yourself, else Triaged, and subscribe ubuntu-cruft-busters to it so it shows up on the team Bugs page.

3. If the package has rdepends, submit and link bug reports against each package that has the rdepend.

• - Upload patches and so forth against the rdepends to remove the dependencies

4. Once all rdepends are resolved, subscribe the archive admins to the bug, and link it to the source package to be removed; make sure to mark it Confirmed so the archive admins know to check it

5. Make sure the bug is closed once the package is removed from the archive.

Current Outstanding Packages

TODO: Fill me in