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

Thierry Vignaud thierry.vignaud at gmail.com
Mon Dec 10 15:35:28 CET 2012


On 10 December 2012 15:27, nicolas vigier <boklm at mars-attacks.org> wrote:
>> 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 :

That won't work, if it's a conflicts instead of an obsoletes,
urpmi/drakx/rpmdrake
will _never_ pick it.
That's just not the way it works.

>  - users who want to remove unsupported packages install task-obsolete,
>    and have a warning from rpmdrake/urpmi before conflicting packages
>    are removed

Meaning nobody will install it in practice.
Meaning people will have some unsecure packages b/c 0.001% want
to keep an unsecure/unmaintained stuff, meaning we'll got bug reports
about packages we don't maintain anymore.

>  - 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.

That would mean most people will never see it where 0.0001% of users
would want them not to be installed.

My 2 cents


More information about the Mageia-dev mailing list