Re: Mass-remove zombie golang-*-dev sources before forky?

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Sat, 15 Aug 2026 21:41:03 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Eric Dorland <[email protected]> writes:

>> I've prepared a list of Go source/library packages (i.e., a Debian
>> source package providing a single golang-*-dev binary containing source
>> code for building other packages) that have no reverse dependencies in
>> Debian.  There are 205 packages dated 2020 or earlier, which are
>> candidates for removal:
>> 
>> https://salsa.debian.org/go-team/infra/golang-qa-find-zombies/-/jobs/10136666#L141
>
> [snip]
>
> This looks great but I wonder how much of it is specific to Go

None really (except for some hard coded 'golang' strings).

> and shouldn't just be applied in general to all library packages?

Are you thinking of Rust?

For C, I'm not so sure the concept is applicable.  Debian C "library
packages" normally contains a binary shared/static library that can be
useful for a user.

The Golang "library package" only contains source code, packaged and
installed in a way that I doubt has any value to anyone not building
Debian Go Packages.

For Python I think things are different too -- if I install a Python
library from Debian, my 'python3' binary will know about it, and I can
build non-Debian applications using that library, and I think this isn't
uncommon.

So maybe the situation for Go in Debian is a bit special here.  I don't
know if Rust is more similar to Go though, could be.

/Simon

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