Hi all,
So I've just been notified that tolua++ has been retired, which is a dependency of one of my packages (fawkes). BZ: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1736911
This would have been fine (as no action has been taken), if the automation had actually followed the FTBFS guidelines [1]. But it hasn't, in many ways: 1. "If an FTBFS or FTI bug remains in the NEW state for at least 1 week, any concerned party can set a NEEDINFO for the maintainer to respond and send an e-mail reminder with the Bugzilla link to <component_name>-maintainers@fedoraproject.org, cc’ing the devel mailing list (so there is a public record) and commenting on the bug about doing so." I did not see such an email on devel. Also NEEDINFO was set on Sep 22, ~10 weeks after retirement. 2. "If the bug remains in NEW state for at least another 4 weeks after the second e-mail and comment (= at least 8 weeks in total), the package will be orphaned. Orphaning can be requested via a releng issue." There was no email at all, at least not to devel, or the maintainers of the dependencies of tolua++. 3. "The normal Orphaned package that needs new maintainers procedure will be followed for the packages orphaned in this way, leading to their retirement if nobody adopts them." This did not happen either. In particular, it was never announced that the package was orphaned. 4. In fact, as far as I can tell, the package was never orphaned, but directly retired.
To put it differently, the guidelines were completely ignored. The package was retired 6 days after the initial FTBFS bug, without any announcement. This is in stark contrast to the 14 weeks mentioned in the guidelines. To add to this, the retirement isn't even mentioned in the bug report. It just silently happened.
The comment "your package has not been built successfully in 31. Action is required from you" isn't helping either, as the package has long been retired at that time.
I understand and support that FTBFS packages are retired, but this is not the way this should work. There was no way I could have heard about the issue in time. It effectively requires me to become co-maintainer on every package that I depend on. Clearly not something I want to do.
So can we please make sure that guidelines apply to everybody, also and especially to scripts?
Thanks, Till
[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fesco/Fails_to_build_from_source_Fails_...