Dear FTP Masters,

The reasons cited in previous RM bug #1100760 still stand.

I don't know the reasoning that led Ilu to work on this;
but they ended up only makin three tiny commits on 1/5/2025
and since this useless middleware package is again a QA drain.

https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=ilu%40solydxk.com

There is a new RC bug,
please remove the package (for good ?)

Greetings

Alexandre

Hi Alexandre,

The motivation was/is to fix a UX regression in Synaptic introduced by the
hasty removal of debbugs infrastructure. Namely the "Quick Filter" bar in
synaptic is not available without it. See
https://github.com/mvo5/synaptic/pull/153 and
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1103351 for more
background.

There is some WIP code in synaptic to keep that feature without depending
on apt-xapian-index, but so far that has not landed:
https://github.com/mvo5/synaptic/pull/146.

IIRC Ilu is working on a Debian derrivative for users with special needs
where this seemingly minor UX regression was more painful than one might
think.
be) a drain on QA since it's not marked as QA maintained. Could you explain
what you mean and why QA feels responsible for this package?

For context: Ilu is new to Debian package maintanance (and software
development for that matter) and took over maintanership based on my
encouragement. I would ask for some patience and support please :-).

Since #1145121 is only six weeks old I would ask to hold off on that and
give the maintainer some time to respond first.

Thanks,
--Daniel

I do not understand why those "debtags" come up again and again in
conjunction with this package. They were removed years ago.

apt-xapian-index provides general support for indexing. After its sudden
removal synaptic had to remove its indexing function. The synaptic
version that re-implemented the indexing function provided by
apt-xapian-index was uploaded 2026-10-05. It sometimes happens that
packages "float in the void" while related upstream changes are waiting
to be consolidated into a new version. I do not see why this should be a
reason for removal.

The function apt-xapian-index provides for synaptic has absolutely
nothing to do with any "debtags" database or "debtags" in general. For
some strange reason apt-xapian-index seens to be eternally tied to those
"debtags" in spite of it providing just indexing functionality.

While apt-xapian-index was in testing it installed without problems and
it worked as expected in synaptic. People immediately started using it,
even in stable, and they reported positively.