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

nicolas vigier boklm at mars-attacks.org
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 ?



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