[Mageia-dev] Package drop request: ruby-ParseTree

Mon Dec 10 15:27:02 CET 2012

On Mon, 10 Dec 2012, Colin Guthrie wrote:
+
+> 'Twas brillig, and Johnny A. Solbu at 08/12/12 10:37 did gyre and gimble:
+> > On Saturday 8. December 2012 11.06, Guillaume Rousse wrote:
+> >>> Unless I misunderstand, adding it to «task-obsolete» does the same thing, with a 2 week delay on deleting.
+> >>> So the proper action would be to add it to «task-obsolete».
+> >> That's still not the proper action. 
+> > 
+> > In other words, I did misunderstand.
+> > 
+> >> Stop removing packages from end 
+> >> user machines just to remove them from the mirrors as a side effect of 
+> >> our package submission procedure.
+> > 
+> > So what should we do?
+> > The current packaging guidelines[1] says that this is the correct action for obsolete packages, which a depcrecated package is.
+> > If this is not the desired solution, then the guidelines should change. Perhaps just clairfied as to what is an obsolete package, which belongs in task-obsolete, and what is Not an obsolete package even if it's deprecated.
+> > 
+> > [1] https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Packaging_guidelines#Obsoleting_a_package
+> 
+> I totally agree with Johnny here. If users want to keep unmaintained and
+> no-longer-supplied packages on their machine (obviously making a
+> concious decision to not get security updates etc. on such packages)
+> then they are welcome to add task-obsolete to their urpmi skip lists.
+> 
+> I see absolutely no problem with this and I don't consider this
+> something that's done as a "side effect", rather it's a quite deliberate
+> and concious mechanism to remove no longer supported packages from a
+> users machine.
+
+One of the problem with task-obsolete obsoleting packages is that it can
+silently uninstall packages and break something which was working,
+without warning.
+
+Maybe instead of obsoleting packages, task-obsolete could conflict with
+those packages :
+ - users who want to remove unsupported packages install task-obsolete,
+   and have a warning from rpmdrake/urpmi before conflicting packages
+   are removed
+ - users who don't want to remove unsupported packages don't install
+   task-obsolete. They can still ask urpmi to install task-obsolete to
+   see the list of packages it would remove.
+
+Or we can stop using task-obsolete package, and instead create a file
+"unsupported" in media_info directory on the mirrors containing a list
+of unsupported packages, and used by urpmq/urpme --unsupported to
+list/remove unsupported packages.
+
+What do you think ?
+
+