We have many orphaned packages in Debian. Those are packages that no longer have a maintainer willing to care for them. They are a problem for several reasons. Often, there have better alternatives (that’s often why the maintainer gave up maintenance), but users keep installing them because they show up in apt-cache search<\/i>. Or, they might be broken, without anybody noticing because they only have a few users. Also, developers need to take them into account. They might slow down transitions, have RC bugs that need fixing, etc.<\/p>\n
So, there are good reasons to remove some of the orphaned packages from the Debian archive. Not all of them. But those that have been orphaned for a long time without anybody stepping up to take over the maintenance, have very few users according to popcon, etc. Removing some of them also makes it easier to expose the ones that should really find an adopter.<\/p>\n
Also, that removal is not final. The good reason to do this now is that we are at the beginning of a release cycle, and that it will be easy to reintroduce packages that are really needed during the next two years. Also, packages (both source and binaries) are still available on snapshot.debian.org<\/a>, so users can still install them from there, and re-uploading them to Debian is very easy if someone wants to adopt them.<\/p>\n