Comment 19 for bug 316858

Martin Pool wrote:
> When you say "the only way", do you mean "the only way within the
> current Soyuz code", or "the only way that works in Debian archives at
> all"?
>
> The first may be true but I don't think the second is. Manually
> maintained archives are perfectly happy holding multiple versions of a
> package and this is IME pretty common for archives maintained by
> upstream developers. We always had this for baz and bzr before moving
> to PPAs

Yes, I meant "currently in Soyuz." As you say, it's perfectly feasible
to present multiple versions from the same repo. The reason Soyuz
doesn't keep them around is driven from a distro team requirement, and
we carried that paradigm into PPAs (which is arguably more important so
people don't blow their quota as easily).

I see a couple of orthogonal issues:
1. Some people want the binaries in the librarian to live forever (OEM
services for example)
2. Some people want the binaries in the repo to live almost forever. By
almost, I think you want to be ideally able to say "I don't need this
old version any more" and have it superseded on demand, right?

It would be a very nice piece of work for us to make this all
configurable. In fact, it presents commercial revenue options so I'd
like to do it, but unless Kiko says otherwise I can't see it getting
done before 3.0.