Now that the deborphan package has been removed from unstable,
the section "Make transition packages deborphan compliant" in
"Best Packaging Practices" is out of date and should be updated.

See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1065312
where "apt-mark auto ..." (for autoremove) is suggested as a
replacement. But with it, putting transition packages to oldlibs
is even more necessary.

Hi Vincent,

thanks for filing this bug report. Patches are very welcome, it's all
mark down now.

Hi!

While I fully support properly marking obsolete packages by putting
them in the (unfortunately misnamed :) oldlibs section (well excluding
library-like depended on packages that get dropped as a mater of course).
I wanted to note that I've received some pushback from the archive
maintainers about this being considered unnecessary churn (paraphrasing
from what ISTR). So it would be nice to clarify this with them before
creating and proposing a procedure that might end up generating social
friction.

Thanks,
Guillem

I tend to agree. Already now maintainers forget to drop transitional
packages after having them been part of *two* releases (I have filed >400 bugs
requesting removal of such old transitional packages in the last 10y, so
roughly 80 per release), so I don't think requiring them to do *more*
will work out nicely.

(also this adds workload to ftpmasters too.)