#1131230 dak rm: please report newly broken Testsuite-Triggers

#1131230#5
Date:
2026-03-19 09:43:19 UTC
From:
To:
When the archive team removes an obsolete package, dak does a check on
whether it will break any Depends or Build-Depends first[1], and it's
conventional for developers doing QA work to check proposed removals
against

    dak rm -R -n $source
    dak rm -R -n -b $binary

before proposing removals.

However, this doesn't check source packages' Testsuite-Triggers fields,
so it's easy for developers doing removals to miss the fact that
removing a transitional or otherwise unwanted package will break other
packages' test suites.  For example, in #1125099, the ocaml team cleaned
up Depends and Build-Depends on ocaml-nox before removing it, but didn't
notice that packages like ocaml-qcheck still rely on it for their
autopkgtest coverage.

It would be great if `dak rm` would check the Testsuite-Triggers before
removing (or pretending to remove) the package, presumably with a way to
override that check and remove the package anyway.

Thanks,
    smcv

[1] although that check might not be comprehensive, see #1118954