Obsolete packages request for removal

[Michael Webster]

Greetings,

I am one of the upstream maintainers of Cinnamon (desktop) and Nemo (file
manager).

There are currently two unofficial PPAs for Ubuntu users to get up-to-date
versions of this software, but at one point in time there was a maintainer
for these packages on Debian, and so they made their way into Ubuntu
eventually.  For whatever reasons, that maintainer abandoned the project,
but unfortunately these very old, obsolete, and unsupported packages are
still available in Ubuntu.

This results in a few problems:

- Users end up with non-working software (for various reasons, mostly
attributable to library changes like GTK+ 3)
- Users think they've got the latest, greatest versions, and report bugs on
these unsupported versions.
- The bugs get reported to their packages' Launchpad pages, which are
unattended.
- Users have some expectation of support, when in fact there is no support
for these older versions.

There is currently an initiative in Debian to re-introduce up-to-date
packages for Cinnamon, but there is no official involvement, nor is there
really any timeline on when it might trickle down to Ubuntu.

In the meantime, I'd like to humbly request that these packages be removed
from distribution (universe), and if possible, some note attesting to such,
when a user goes to the Launchpad page for that package.  I will make an
effort to redirect users that have reported bugs there to use more
appropriate channels.

The package names I am requesting this for are:

cinnamon
nemo
muffin

Thank you very much.

If this is an inappropriate mailing list for this topic, I would appreciate
a recommendation as to the correct avenue to use for my request.
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