6.7.7. Make transition packages deborphan compliant

Deborphan is a program for helping users to detect which packages can safely be removed from the system, i.e. the ones that have no packages depending on them. The default operation is to search only within the libs and oldlibs sections, to hunt down unused libraries. But when passed the right argument, it tries to catch other useless packages.

For example, with --guess-dummy, deborphan tries to search all transitional packages which were needed for upgrade but which can now be removed. For that, it currently looks for the string dummy or transitional in their short description, though it would be better to search for both strings, as there are some dummy or transitional packages, which have other purposes.

So, when you are creating such a package, please make sure to add transitional dummy package to the short description to make this explicit. If you are looking for examples, just run: apt-cache search .|grep dummy or apt-cache search .|grep transitional.

Also, it is recommended to adjust its section to oldlibs and its priority to optional in order to ease deborphan‘s job.