bug#64669: [PATCH 0/2] Remove ddclient and its service.

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Bruno and Oleg,

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> skribis:

> Bruno Victal <mirai@makinata.eu> skribis:
>
>> ddclient is unmaintained as of 2023-07-04 [1] and this service has been 
>> broken
>> for a while [2]. Remove it rather than shipping a broken service for an
>> unmaintained program that's unlikely to be fixed.
>>
>> [1]: <https://github.com/ddclient/ddclient>
>> [2]: <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/52770>
>
> I sympathize with the goal, though I wonder if it would make sense to
> give potential users a bit of time to weigh in (and perhaps take over
> the project upstream, who knows?).

It’s now been one month, so I went ahead and pushed these as
1bd44b425b79e9da160b33a9b19d01973b44772e.

We discussed this on IRC today and I must say I’m not satisfied with the
process because potential users have no practical way to learn about
pending removals.

One suggestion that was made is to add a deprecation mechanism that,
instead of requiring a replacement for what’s being deprecated, would
take either #f or a (translatable) string explaining why it’s being
deprecated.

I guess we should implement that and document a guideline for removals,
as had already been proposed before.  (Cc’ing maintainers for the
discussion.)

Thoughts?

Ludo’.