Retire Orphaned Packages
Description
Every release prior to the Feature Freeze/Branching Release Engineering retires orphaned packages. This keeps out unowned software and prevents future problems down the road.
Action
The orphan process takes place in stages:
-
Detecting a list of orphans and the dependencies that will be broken if the orphans are removed.
-
Sending the list of potential orphans to devel@lists.fedoraproject.org for community review and removal from the orphan list.
-
Retriring packages nobody wants to adopt.
Detecting Orphans
A script called find_unblocked_orphans.py
assists in the detection
process. It should be run on a machine that has koji
and
python-fedora
installed. It runs without options and takes a while to
complete.
find_unblocked_orphans.py
is available in the
Release Engineering git repository
Announcing Packages to be retired
find_unblocked_orphans.py
outputs text to stdout on the command line
in a form suitable for the body of an email message.
$ ./find-unblocked-orphans.py > email-message
Email the output to the development list
(devel@lists.fedodraproject.org
) at least a month before the feature
freeze, send mails with updated lists as necessary. This gives
maintainers an opportunity to pick up orphans that are important to them
or are required by other packages.
Retiring Orphans
Once maintainers have been given an opportunity to pick up orphaned packages, the remaining packages are retired
Verification
To verify that the packages were blocked correctly we can use the
latest-pkg
koji
action.
$ koji latest-pkg dist-f41 wdm
This should return nothing, as the wdm
package is blocked.
Consider Before Running
Generally we retire anything that doesn’t leave broken dependencies. If
there are orphans whose removal would result in broken dependencies a
second warning should be sent to devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
and to
<package>-owner@fedoraproject.org
for each dependent package.
Allow another couple of days for maintainers to take notice and fix these package so the package repository can be maintained without broken dependencies or needing to the package. It is not good to have broken package dependencies in our package repositories so every effort should be made to find owners or to fix the broken dependencies.
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