>> Stephen Michael Kellat:

“A number of upstreams do not want to be packaged such as calibre oddly enough. We don't want to eviscerate the archive.”

Then maybe they shouldn't release their work as Free Software, should they? O_o

I understand the distribution not wanting to "fight" with unwilling upstreams, but something like "ok, we won't include it in the next release" sounds more coherent.

Removing packages from under users' feet sounds pretty crazy to me. Especially when said packages are Free Software, not a case of "whooops, this was illegal software and we didn't know!".