On Fri, Feb 6, 2026, at 11:20 AM, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Marcin Juszkiewicz <[email protected]> said:
> > After making another 10 years old package build on RISC-V 64-bit
> > port I started to wonder:
> > 
> > Will there be some kind of 'does anyone uses it still' check in Fedora?
> 
> There's really no way to see "is it used".

Yeah, this is a very hard problem because a LOT of software is being used in 
ways no one really knows. Removing said software from the distribution will 
only fire up a 'where did my software go???' usually 2 to 3 years after it has 
been removed because whatever was working fine until a hardware outage caused a 
full rebuild to occur or an audit requires upgrading to something supported. 

I expect that Chris's ufiformat is being used by some system to run payroll for 
an orphanage and no one knows it. This is one of the problems of doing a 
'everything including the kitchen sink' distro like Fedora and Debian. There 
are a lot of things which get put somewhere because it solved a problem and 
never needed to be updated or fixed because the problem didn't change and the 
solution still works. Trying to work out what those are turns out to be a lot 
of work because no one wants to tell you until its gone, and if they tell you 
you have to comply with all kinds of privacy rules to make sure you don't know 
who they were. Just trying to add the various things like popcorn or fixing the 
hardware database turned into long slogs with lawyers because people have 
legitimate fears of surveillance. [Maybe that orphanage doesn't want to get 
added to a hit list for some reason.] Trying to drop packages on age turns into 
the same arguments we have had for 20 years about this. 

Honestly I don't have a good solution.. but maybe someone else does 


--
Stephen J Smoogen.
Let us be kind to one another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle. -- 
Ian MacClaren
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