Sub-package dropped upstream

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 9 Jan 2014 12:08:49 -0800, Jorge Gallegos wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I maintain the uwsgi package for fedora, which optionally builds a bunch
> of modules to integrate with several other languages. One of the plugins
> got recently removed upstream but it hasn't got any replacements yet (see
> the top of http://uwsgi-docs.readthedocs.org/en/latest/Erlang.html)
> 
> Currently f19 and f20 have 1.9.19 available, and I would like to update
> to 1.9.21 but that would mean I have to deprecate the existing package
> uwsgi-plugin-erlang. Is this the correct approach? adding an obsoletes
> tag in the spec for uwsgi-plugin-erlang < 1.9.20 ?

That would be the only way to withdraw the package from users'
installations, especially if not obsoleting it would result in broken
dependencies.

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Renaming.2FReplacing_Existing_Packages

Depending on how popular the package might be, such breakage could
annoy users.

> Tangential question, do we have statistics of how many times this (or
> any other) package has been downloaded?

Hardly feasible, given that every mirror server would need to count
downloads and submit the results to the Fedora Project, and then one could
still not conclude safely whether a package has been installed actually
and is still in use (or has been downloaded/mirrored only).