Shorewall removed from Fedora Extras

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 27 Sep 2005 13:27:41 -0400, Jeff Spaleta wrote:

> On 9/27/05, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> > "Some of these packages are ancient and insecure.  If no one is bothering
> > to maintain them AND they're huge security risks, we need to orphan them
> > and pull the RPMs from the repo."
> 
> How do we go about informing users that have these packages
> installed... that these packages are now expired from the repo?

Wrong question. Why? Because the important step is not the removal from
the repo, but announcing that a package is unmaintained. And that has
happened in the Wiki a long time ago. Shorewall has been listed as
unmaintained since pre-Extras. A year ago it should have been announced
that the packager lost interest.

Fedora Extras doesn't have Release Notes like Fedora Core (except for the
very limited Wiki "FC?Status" pages), since it is not release-based.

Currently, I would prefer if a simple Fedora Extras News page covered such
announcements. Because if it took place in a more prominent place (let's
say fedora-announce-list -- not everyone is subscribed to that list
either), we would post notifications of packages being marked as
unmaintained and a week later announce a new maintainer and so on.

> And
> no... i don't think annoucing it solely in this mailinglist is due
> diligence with regard to informing users who have been pulling
> packages from extras with client tools. We have a variety of channels
> to communicate updates or new packages but we haven't really thought
> about how to make sure users are aware of situations where we have
> actually removed/expired packages. At the very least communicating
> removed/expired packages via the repoview rss feed seems appropriate
> to bring the level of notification on par with rawhide removals.

Why "at least"? Who reads those feeds? Certainly not everyone, who *may*
be interested. The least is to announce it here in addition to marking the
package as unmaintained for over a year.

I'm surprised you bring this up, since so far we don't guarantee anything
with regard to Fedora Extras. I believe that anyone with interest in
Fedora Extras should come to us regularly (i.e. Fedora Extras information
web pages), not vice versa. Trying to reach every user "out there" is
mission impossible.

> Though I think Extras users deserve a better notification of removal
> mechanism than rawhide users so this step would be just a start.

Removal notification is something for the resolver level.