[racket] deprecating planet version using para. in planet description?

Robby Findler wrote at 12/06/2013 09:38 AM:
>
>>
>>     You could also remove it from both planet repositories to just
>>     hide it from planet depending on your desire to support older
>>     versions of racket.
>
>     Wouldn't that break all code that has a direct or indirect
>     dependency on any version of that PLaneT package?
>
>
> Yes. I should have been more clear: there are a number of packages on 
> planet that currently just don't work and for which there are new 
> package system variants. Depending on the authors' intentions to 
> support those planet packages, this may be a good idea. I'm 
> specifically thinking about authors that expect only newcomers to come 
> across them and then to get broken code and they would rather those 
> newcomers just didn't find the planet packages and instead found the 
> new package system's code, this might be a viable approach.

All these years, I have had a different assumption of what it means for 
a package or version to be added to the PLaneT server.  If a package or 
version was there at some point, then I would still expect it to still 
be there, even if it doesn't work with the latest versions of Racket or 
other things.

 From my perspective, removing packages from PLaneT because one is not 
able to maintain them (or perhaps wants to maintain them only in the new 
package system, as you mention) doesn't seem like a great idea.  I'd 
rather see appropriate use of documentation and metadata to indicate 
that, say, the package does not work with current versions of Racket or 
that it is no longer being maintained.

(The only cases in which I'd currently expect to see a version (not a 
package) removed from PLaneT are if it was found to have a showstopper 
security vulnerability, someone accidentally leaked very sensitive info 
into the ".plt", or there was a court order.)

As a practical matter, if others think that casually removing packages 
from PLaneT is OK, then I'll just change how I use PLaneT accordingly, 
rather than try to change people's minds.  However, I do suspect that 
that kind of measure erodes credibility a little, for practical and 
research purposes.

Neil V.

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