On Mon, 10 Dec 2012, Colin Guthrie wrote: > 'Twas brillig, and Johnny A. Solbu at 08/12/12 10:37 did gyre and gimble: > > On Saturday 8. December 2012 11.06, Guillaume Rousse wrote: > >>> Unless I misunderstand, adding it to «task-obsolete» does the same thing, > >>> with a 2 week delay on deleting. > >>> So the proper action would be to add it to «task-obsolete». > >> That's still not the proper action. > > > > In other words, I did misunderstand. > > > >> Stop removing packages from end > >> user machines just to remove them from the mirrors as a side effect of > >> our package submission procedure. > > > > So what should we do? > > The current packaging guidelines[1] says that this is the correct action > > for obsolete packages, which a depcrecated package is. > > If this is not the desired solution, then the guidelines should change. > > Perhaps just clairfied as to what is an obsolete package, which belongs in > > task-obsolete, and what is Not an obsolete package even if it's deprecated. > > > > [1] https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Packaging_guidelines#Obsoleting_a_package > > I totally agree with Johnny here. If users want to keep unmaintained and > no-longer-supplied packages on their machine (obviously making a > concious decision to not get security updates etc. on such packages) > then they are welcome to add task-obsolete to their urpmi skip lists. > > I see absolutely no problem with this and I don't consider this > something that's done as a "side effect", rather it's a quite deliberate > and concious mechanism to remove no longer supported packages from a > users machine.
One of the problem with task-obsolete obsoleting packages is that it can silently uninstall packages and break something which was working, without warning. Maybe instead of obsoleting packages, task-obsolete could conflict with those packages : - users who want to remove unsupported packages install task-obsolete, and have a warning from rpmdrake/urpmi before conflicting packages are removed - users who don't want to remove unsupported packages don't install task-obsolete. They can still ask urpmi to install task-obsolete to see the list of packages it would remove. Or we can stop using task-obsolete package, and instead create a file "unsupported" in media_info directory on the mirrors containing a list of unsupported packages, and used by urpmq/urpme --unsupported to list/remove unsupported packages. What do you think ?
