Re: Removal of gtkmm20 (was Re: Packages failing rebuild for FE4)

[Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta gmail com>]

On 5/24/05, Jeremy Katz <katzj redhat com> wrote:
> [1] It does bring up that we should probably have a slightly more
> documented process on how to deprecate/remove packages.  For now, I say
> we stick to "mail the list, see if anyone objects horribly"

And on a related note, how to notify users of extras that these
packages have been dropped.  Extras is somewhere between a rolling
release and a point release model. I'm not sure a 'release notes'
document like Core has/had detailing what has been removed since 'last
release' makes sense as the primary notification tool for Extras.  I
doubt it's valid to assume that all package expirations from Extras
will come at the opening of a new branch.

Appropriate notification of package expiration is a tough nut. 
Ideally, it would be great if there was a way to inform all users
relying on expired Extras packages that there will no longer be
updates from this repository, through the same mechanisms as they get
updates.  But I don't see a way to do that within the current
technical limitations of rpms without adding an additional peice of
information at the repository level that kept a list of expired
packagenames with timestamps for that repository. Package update tools
could then parse that additional list of expired packages to notify
users of expiration events.

-jef