On 2016-11-18 08:30 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
Actually, I am inclined to believe only packages which are replaced by others within Fedora or are definitely dead can be obsoleted. Package which a just being retired for current/temporary lack interest/maintainer should not be obsoleted.
I disagree, for exactly the reason we're discussing here: it tends to break upgrades. At some point the dependencies for the package will stop being available in a new release, and then upgrading to that release will be problematic.
I don't really like gnome-software's behaviour (as explained in this thread) of silently removing packages that are blocking the upgrade, because it could be quite destructive. But as long as retired packages aren't obsoleted, I can't see how it can do anything besides that, or asking the user, which is really a bad idea for many users who just won't know what to do and will be very stressed trying to pick a choice.
I guess one tweak I would be okay with would be a sort of weaker-Obsoletes mechanism: some kind of field that provides a hint to package managers that by default it's OK for the packaging system to remove a given package if it's blocking another transaction. Then we could tag all retired packages with that, and people who really want to keep ancient unmaintained packages around could have a flip to switch that says 'don't do that'. Of course, it's one more conditional for some poor sap to maintain.
-- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org
