On 11/18/2016 06:03 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: > 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.
gnome-software doesn't silently remove packages that are blocking the upgrade, it asks the user before removing anything. I'd argue that asking the user is a good behaviour, at least for leaf packages that they might have manually installed. Maybe not that much for libraries that were only installed just to satisfy dependencies. Also, going down the mega-obsolete-package route would cause gnome-software to _stop_ warning about packages that get removed during the upgrade: obsoletes are just silently handled. This may not be what users expect. I do think there is value in having a mega-obsolete-package, but mostly to get unmaintained and possibly vulnerable software removed from users systems. I don't think it would make upgrades less problematic because both dnf and gnome-software can already remove problematic packages without needing obsoletes. > 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. The package not being available in any repos could be that hint, maybe? -- Kalev _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org
