Debian is Deleting Its Own History

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 02, 2025

• Jonathan Dowland: Debian Chronicles

  I recently learned that, about 6 months ago, the Debian webteam deleted all news articles from the main website older than 2022. There have been several complaints from people in and outside of Debian, notably Joe Brockmeier of LWN, and this really sad one from the nephew of a deceased developer, wondering where the obituary had gone, but the team have not been swayed and are not prepared to reinstate the news.

• Re: Peter Miller memorial page

  I am the nephew of Peter Miller, a now deceased debian project contributor. In 2014 he had an article announcing his death @ https://www.debian.org/News/2014/20141020 But that page has since been made unavailable.

• remove old news

  I think that's a mistake, honestly. Trying to trawl through the mailing list for issues is harder, and reaping the archives contributes to link rot. I discovered this because a link from a search engine 404'ed when trying to go to a DWN that has been axed. That's a bad experience for users and doesn't help people.

  By all means, only show X number of new posts on the main page, but the actual issues should still be on the web and not just buried in the mailing list archives.