On Nov 26, 2012 8:22 AM, "Jan Kratochvil" <jan.kratochvil@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:00:17 +0100, Josh Boyer wrote:

> > If perf winds up getting stuck relying on an orphaned library for some
> > non-trivial amount of time,
>
> AFAIK that is common in Fedora there are orphaned libraries in use for
> a release or two.
>
It is somewhat common but not really what we want by design.  There's an inherent race between something being orphaned and getting it out of the repositories.

*once a package has been released for users we have no way to remove it.  So, at present you could get rid of this for f18+ but we'd keep it for f17 and less even if it was orphaned.
* we retire orphaned packages and block them from the repositories once a cycle.  But if you orphan the package after we do that for this cycle it will not get blocked unless you explicitly request it.

But these are just implementation.  Ideally we want every package that gets released to the users to have a maintainer that is watching bug reports and attempting to fix anything serious.

So if you know you aren't going to fix bugs for this package in f19, the best answer is to block this package from f19 and get those packages that currently depend on it to stop doing so (by disabling features or porting to something else.) (And not necessarily in that order.) If you wanted to do this for f18 as well it might be a little late since it's something that requires cooperation with multiple packages.

Toshio