[ACTION REQUIRED] Retiring packages for F-17

[Kevin Kofler]

Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Due to the orphaning of packages due to inactive maintainers, this list
> is a little longer than normal.

When we're in danger of losing so many packages, it's a sign that our 
processes are broken:

* The forced password and SSH key change caused us to lose many maintainers, 
not all of whom would have become inactive if it hadn't been for such stupid 
asinine and totally useless (since the keys were NOT compromised) "security" 
bureaucracy being forced on them, wasting their time.

* The whole concept of packages being "owned", and by one person at that, is 
broken. Fedora as a whole should feel responsible for those packages, commit 
access should be open to ALL packagers (not just provenpackagers) as in the 
good old Extras, and there should be experienced packagers actually stepping 
in to rebuild packages with broken dependencies, fix FTBFS issues etc. (I 
used to do that, but I had to mostly give up because nobody else would help 
(Alex Lancaster used to help fixing broken dependencies, but mostly doesn't 
anymore) and I don't have the time to do it all alone anymore.) And packages 
such as perl-* should just be owned (automatically) by the relevant SIG.

* Depending on timing, some packages can end up retired with little to no 
time to pick them up first, e.g. in one case (avl), your mail threatens to 
retire a package less than 97 minutes (!) after it got orphaned. The time 
between the mass orphaning due to the "security" farce and the mass retiring 
(now) is also deeply insufficient, and there wasn't even one updated list of 
not yet picked up packages from the "security" fiasco (the original one 
contained way too many packages for packagers to notice the ones of 
interest) before this one which already threatens their removal.

Any package which is removed from Fedora is a package our users will no 
longer be able to use. Removing a package should only be a last resort if it 
cannot be made to work at all.

        Kevin Kofler