[Fedora-packaging] how to remove buggy packages from repo

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2014 12:00:36 +0200, Martin Gansser wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> i am the owner of the package guayadeque, but the recent package for Fedora 21 guayadeque-0.3.7-4.svn1893.fc21
> segfaults. All versions above guayadeque-0.3.6-19.svn1890.fc21 are buggy.
> 
> The problem is already disccussed: (but not fixed) at
> http://guayadeque.org/index.php?p=/discussion/1822/guayadeque-stops-after-every-track
> 
> there exists already a bugreport:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1151645
> 
> is it possible to delete all versions that are newer than 12.4 from the repo, or is there
> another possibility to prevent that these buggy versions are used.

In my opinion, you ask the wrong question. Imagine these "buggy versions"
would have been discovered *after* release of Fedora 21. By removing packages
from the repos, you don't fix the product (= the distribution) and you don't
remove packages from existing installations either. 

The only true way forward would be to release working updates. If you
believe there won't be a fixed version available soon enough (don't get
nervous as F21 has not been released yet!) and you prefer a downgrade, you
could downgrade anytime. No need to bump the "Epoch". You could package a
working upstream version with a higher %version - which wouldn't be too
bad since snapshots often do that, too (especially if the next official
version number is not known yet, and you would likely use the svn1890
checkout mentioned above - whether you call it 0.3.6-19.svn1890 or
0.3.7-X.svn1890 isn't crucial).

Btw, Fedora typically does not offer the possibility to remove released
packages from repos. Unless it's within Rawhide and breaks buildroots, for
example.