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

[Remy CLOUARD]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 03:55:05PM +0100, Guillaume Rousse wrote:
> Le 10/12/2012 14:01, Colin Guthrie a écrit :
> >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.
> Shikamaru never asked about end user machines, but about mirrors.
> Hence my point:
> - if you just want to remove some files from the mirrors, ask an admin
> - if you also want to remove old packages from end users machines,
> first think twice about the expected result, then update
> task-obsolete
> 
> And on the more general interest of using obsolete tags, I'd rather
> suggest to refrain from using them without a very good reason. In
> ten years of contribution, I've never seen the mandriva bugzilla
> drowned by bug reports about unsupported packages (the main argument
> in support of the current 'thou shall obsoletes anything that is not
> supported anymore' frenzy), whereas I've seen at least two recent
> painful episodes in cauldron caused by careless packagers...
Thanks, that pretty much clarify my intent indeed.

At first I didn’t even know task-obsolete existed in the first place so
I just followed the procedure Johnny explained. After understanding this
mechanism I don’t feel it was the right thing to do in this case.

First, because it’s a small ruby library that’s probably used by only a
handful of people. Second, this library is removed because it’s eol’d
upstream, but also because no other package use it. It seems to me that
it can safely be removed from the mirrors, but removing it from boxes
via task-obsolete seems a bit overkill to me, because that package would
have been orphaned because nothing requires it (unless someone
deliberately installed it, which I doubt)

I’m not yet sure about this but the way I see task-obsolete is that it
should only be used for end-applications, and even then I’m not
comfortable with silently removing things from people’s machines, I’d
rather use Conflicts instead.

Regards,
> 
> -- 
> BOFH excuse #234:
> 
> Someone is broadcasting pygmy packets and the router doesn't know
> how to deal with them.
-- 
Rémy CLOUARD
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