How quickly should we retire orphaned packages?

[Till Maas]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 03:11:53PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> (a) The reason for wanting packages to be retired so quickly has not
> been made clear by rel-eng.

Miloslav explained this nicely.

> (b) The biggest reason for people to use one distro over another is
> based on number of packages available to be installed.  By retiring
> packages more quickly we inevitably reduce this number thereby making
> Fedora less popular.

One of the reasons to chose Fedora is also to be first. This is also not
true for orphaned packages nobody takes care of. Also since the package
will usually be retired up to six months later, I doubt that this really
makes an impact of why people chose Fedora.

> (d) 4 weeks is too short.  Some people go on holiday for this long.

If the process only happens once per week as I proposed, there is an
additional half week in average.  There are additional 2 weeks in which
packages can be unretired without much effort. And even then it would be
easy to find a packager for a re-review if one asks here on the devel
list.

Regards
Till