Summary - Broken dependencies in Fedora 7 + Test Updates - 2007-10-16

[Denis Leroy]

Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> Gee that sounds suspiciously like you're offering to maintain this package.

No waitaminute :-) No, I said I'd try to build it and check whether it's 
working or not. I can already say that it doesn't work at all on 
rawhide. However I have no intention of ever fixing or updating it, or 
processing its bugzilla tickets. As was said in previous msg, upstream 
is long dead.

> I don't think just one-off rebuilding it "solves" the problem either.

Agreed, but we need a short-term solution.

> What we really really need in these sorts of situation is have
> client-side notice that a package has been orphaned/expired via the
> package management tools, letting all users of that package know via
> their repository aware tools that the package is orphaned/removed and
> will no longer be receiving updates unless a maintainer shows up. At
> which point the users can choose to uninstall the package or perhaps
> step up and offer to be the maintainer of it.  I think users of
> orphaned packages deserve a chance to state an interest in maintaining
> packages when they get orphaned/removed. If we are only announcing
> orphaned status in channels that other current contributors are
> watching we are sacrificing an opportunity to add contributors to
> spread the workload around.

A good idea, but not a simple one to implement. How would you 
communicate the information to the package management tool ? The tool 
couldn't distinguish between an Obsolete caused by an orphan versus one 
caused by, say, a package rename. Maybe a RSS feed of some sort ?