How quickly should we retire orphaned packages?

[Till Maas]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 09:07:34AM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> I don't understand the reference to "up to six months later" here.
> 
> Can you explain how retirement is proposed to work precisely, with
> timescales.

> And here, "unretired without much effort" means what exactly?

This is the process for Fedora (EPEL is slightly different in case
someone wonders):

- PoCs can orphan their packages every time for every release
  (Maybe this applies to everyone with commit ACLs or should at least
  allow for everyone with commit ACLs)
- Anyone can retire orphaned packages in Branched till the final change
  deadline or in Rawhide. Then a reason is stored in a dead.package file
  in dist-git.
- Once a week there is a report sent to devel at fpo about which
  packages were retired/orphaned in the previous week
- Prior to branching, all orphaned and long time FTBFS packages are
  retired by rel-eng (with two releases a year, every orphaned package
  would be retired up to six months later). Also packages depending on
  packages to be retired will be retired, unless someone takes care of
  them. The announcements usually start some weeks prior to branching.
- Up to two weeks after a package is retired, no re-review is required,
  so unretirement requires a ticket for rel-eng to unblock the package
  from koji to allow builds being distributed, an update to pkgdb to
  change the state from Retired to Approved  (which currently needs to
  be made by rel-eng as well), and reverting the last commit in dist-git
- Afterwards unretiring a package requires are re-review.

Regards
Till