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