Orphaned Packages in rawhide (2015-08-25)

[Till Maas]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 04:56:07PM +0200, Vít Ondruch wrote:

> > What could pkgdb do against this? Automatically retire a package after it has
> > been orphaned more than X days? Automatically send the email?
> > This sounds a lot like the cron jobs Till is running.
> 
> Exactly these ... and it seems although Till sends the notification, the
> retirement is manual action and when he is busy or will be even busier,
> nothing will happen. That doesn't sound right.

I do not see that it is a big issue if packages are orphaned longer than
six weeks, the most important deadlines are before branching and final
freeze to make sure that unmaintained packages do not cause extra work
or are distributed. Also making it automatic will lead to a lot of extra
work since dependent packages will also be retired. Unfortunately not
enough packagers care to remove dependencies to orphaned packages or
maintain the orphaned packages - e.g. 65 packages depend on apache-poi
including wildfly which certainly should not be retired. And finally
retiring a package includes adding a dead.package file to dist git, but
for security reasons package DB will not get unlimited access to dist
git.

Regards
Till