Remove problematic old package versions from mirror?

[anon40418528]

Our mirroring system has accumulated many versions of packages - for example, elxr-config now has 25 versions till now. Should we reduce the number of versions we keep? The reason I’m asking is that some older versions have critical issues like dependency problems, while newer versions work fine.

For example, when trying to install an older version of python3-tiler (0.2.9), it fails because it depends on python3-ruck which isn’t available in our repository. The newer version doesn’t have this issue.

root@debian:~# apt install  python3-tiler=0.2.9
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 python3-tiler : Depends: python3-ruck but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
root@debian:~#

[marcel]

Thanks for raising this, this looks like an issue with the publishing of eLxr managed packages that are published through the shared aptly mechanism in the pipeline project.

Question is if we should go for a single version policy when publishing packages instead of having many old version listed as well. It can be seen for multiple eLxr packages such as rucksack and tiler that we basically keep all versions.

Especially if installation breaks it might be difficult to keep old version laying around. So regardless we need to figure out how to handle and maintain this.

[marcel]

Created an issue on Gitlab for this, broken packages should in all cases not be part of the package repository in my opinion.