On Sun, Jun 21, 2026 at 1:00 PM Max Pyziur <[email protected]> wrote: > Since upgrading to FC44 I've beeng comparing installed rpms on three > machines that I keep current on Fedora. Each was built at a different > earlier date. > > I've noticed that there is a lot of software that has gone stale and has > not been updated in years (using a reference url to the software's > website). Nevertheless, many of these rpms continue to be updated and > included in subsequent releases. >
Before retiring I worked on a large niche scientific application that relied on a long list of numerical libraries with dozens of users from research institutions around the world. There was considerable churn with "new improved" libraries implementing the same calculation, small libraries being adopted by larger libraries, etc. In one case an R library based on a PhD thesis was discontinued. I contacted the PhD supervisor who said the last head heard, the new PhD was driving a taxi. Some "unmaintained" libraries were included in R packages. I had a "test" data set and despite the churn, the results didn't change over 20 years. I've checked some of these for dependencies and deleted them. The process > has been more-or-less brute force (sdiff'ng two lists of rpms from two > machines, and then evaluating the differences, removing and adjusting > accordingly). > > I don't want to be too hasty in removal. But continuing to keep > stale/unmaintained packages might create some security problems. > For my use case, it was important that the package could be built on current mainstream distros. Fortunately, most of the libraries we used had better replacements, but it did take some work to track them down and make sure the results were correct (sometimes needed bug reports). > Considerations? Suggestions? > I did fresh installs of Fedora regularly to make sure I wasn't relying on a library that had been removed from current versions/. RHEL and Ubuntu were the most widely used for our software, but Fedora provided insight into SE Linux configuration issues as well as an early look at what libraries other distros might adopt. Now, with the influx of AI discovered bugs, I think distros are faster to move to current kernels, so SE Linux remains as a reason to use Fedora. -- George N. White III
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