Danek Duvall wrote:
...
Also, does this proposed obsoletion functionality touch on another,
similar need we have for removing 'toxic' packages from a repository
(i.e. legal requirement, etc.)?
There's a connection to toxic (and historical as well), but I decided to
leave that out. The difference between obsolete and toxic is that marking
a package toxic is an operation on an existing version of a package, rather
than introducing a new version. The existing version needs to be marked,
because it needs to be physically yanked (potentially, at least) from the
repo.
I think that the connection between toxic and obsolete are not that
dissimilar, and that now would be a good time to resolve the toxic issue
as well as the obsolete issue.
It seems to me that a toxic package is a type of obsolete package where
the contents are physically unavailable on the depot. I think that
everything else about an obsolete package applies to a toxic package
as well.
In some cases toxic packages are obsolete for which there may never be
a replacement, such as a legal issue which prevents ever republishing
the package. This sounds exactly like an obsolete package that "goes
away entirely".
In other cases there may be toxic packages that are obsoleted and
replaced by a newer version., perhaps a package with a crypto algorithm
compiled in, that is shortly replaced with a newer package with the
specific algorithm removed, again for legal or otherwise reasons.
This sounds exactly like an obsolete package that is replaced by a newer
version or an obsolete package at the same version level that is
replaced with one having a newer time stamp.
In all of the cases I can think of at the moment, the obsoletion
functionality resolves the issues of package management, upgradability
etc., but leaves open only the issue of the "physical removal of bits"
for "certain" obsolete packages.
It seems to me that from an implementation point of view, if you had
a new option say:
pkgsend obsolete ...
you could also add a flag for the physical removal of bits aka:
pkgsend obsolete -r ...
I think would completely resolve the toxic issue as well as the
obsolete problem.
Doug.
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