700+ Packages Retired - What You Should Know

Rationale

Here's a little known fact, AOSC OS has been built upon the same source tree since 2014. That's almost ten years worth of accumulated packages and code!

Impressive, right? Well, not quite in the long run. As we examined our maintenance statistics, we found at a not insignificant proportion of our ABBS Tree hasn't received any update for more than two years. This has prompted us to start retiring packages. How might this benefit users like you?

1. Less unmaintained (orphaned) packages means less packages that may come broken from the repository. You can be more confident about packages working right out of the box.
2. Less work for us means more time to polish existing packages. Merely compiling and packaging software is not enough for a good experience. Take for example our KDE packages, we took time to discuss and test each pre-installed component, finding numerous areas for improvement. It takes hours to work through each affected packages and implement fixes, less time spent on seldom used packages means more time to spend on more frequently used ones.

Effect

What does this mean? This means that some packages that you may be using could be removed from repository and will receive no further updates and fixes. Continue using these package may potentially be risky, as security vulnerabilities will no longer be addressed. To help you be aware of what packages were retired, we have developed Hunter.

Unless you removed util-base at some point, a system update should install this tool automatically. Otherwise, execute the following command to do so:

# sudo apt install hunter

Then, simply run hunter to see a list of affected packages.

Re-introducing Packages

Want a package back in the repository? No problem, just let us know by filing a bug report.

— Mingcong Bai