On Wednesday, August 31, 2022 Troy Dawson wrote:
EPEL2RHEL is part of the RHEL 8 and 9 new package workflow. When a RHEL maintainer wants to add a package to RHEL 8 or 9 they start a "new package workflow". There are several automations that happen when they start that workflow. One of them is checking if the package is already in epel. If it is, it creates a bugzilla against that package, and links that bug against the EPEL2RHEL tracker. [1] Remember, this check currently happens at the beginning of the new package workflow. Before a package has been branched, built, or put into testing repos.
I think this whole process should be automated. File bugs that say "Heads up: your package will be automatically retired after the release of RHEL X.X" and provide some explanation. This will have multiple benefits:
1. Saying "you'll have to do something in six months, but it'll be bad if you do it now" is quite difficult to follow.
2. We can send out one announcement to epel-announce about which packages are going to be retired and when that'll happen, instead of retiring packages in a piecemeal manner.
3. The maintainers won't have to remember to do it.
4. If we find out that a package is buildroot only, then we'll close the bug and exclude it from the automatic retiring.