Re: F38 proposal: Pcre Deprecation (System-Wide Change proposal)
On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 03:42:30PM -0400, Ben Cotton wrote:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PcreDeprecation
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes
process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive
community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved
by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.
== Summary ==
Upstream stopped the support for the old 'pcre' package. It only
supports the new 'pcre2' version, so Fedora should deprecate it so it
could later be retired and removed from Fedora entirely.
== Owner ==
* Name: [[User:ljavorsk| Lukas Javorsky]]
* Email: ljavorsk(a)redhat.com
== Detailed Description ==
Upstream stopped supporting the old 'pcre' package. The 8.45 is marked
as a final release and nothing else will be added/fixed in it. This
may lead to some unresolved CVEs, which would have to be resolved by
the maintainers. Unfortunately, due to our limited capacity, we
wouldn't have the time and experience to solve this by ourselves, so
we need to deprecate this package. After the deprecation is done, the
very next step would be starting the [[PcreRetirement|retirement
change]], so the package is removed from Fedora entirely.
The new 'pcre2' package is out for more than 7 years now and most of
the packages have already been ported to its redefined API.
[https://lists.exim.org/lurker/message/20150105.162835.0666407a.en.html
Mail] about the changes in the pcre2.
snip
== Benefit to Fedora ==
Fedora shouldn't support unsupported packages.
That's an overly broad statement that does not reflect any Fedora
rule / guideline on package inclusion.
Only version large projects have stable maint streams of their
releases, most upstreams only "support" the most recent release
they've made. IOW if the distro isn't shipping the most recent
release then it is effectively shipping unsupported packages.
For Fedora at least if a maintainer frequently rebases to new
releases, they only end up supporting an unsupported package
for upto about 1 year (two stable releases). RHEL is much worse,
as by the time a RHEL release goes EOL, you can consider the
vast majority of software to be "unsupported" from the POV of
the upstream projects.
IOW, it is reasonable to say that one of the core jobs of a
distro [maintainer] is often to provide support for a package
that upstream no longer supports.
The issue is really about how long the distro maintainer is
willing to prolong that effort on a case by case basis.
Not wishing to support multiple versions of a package in
parallel is a reasonable desire for a single maintainer,
to reduce their workload. It is not inherantly wrong for
Fedora more generally though to want to ship and support
something that upstream has stopped supporting. There
just needs to be some use case for it to exist, and a
maintainer willing todo the work.
versions fork from Fedora, it could lead to less secure RHEL as
well.
By deprecating this package, we will send the message to the
maintainers that their packages should port to new pcre2 package and
any new package would have to use only new and supported pcre2
version.
With regards,
Daniel
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