package EOL

[Patrice Dumas]

> A package that has been declared dropped/retired by its former 
> maintainer or by a Fedora Extras house keeper, can be 
> "undropped/unretired" should someone from the Fedora Legacy group choose 
> to take ownership of it.

Why from the Fedora Legacy group? Why not any packager?

> People come out of retirement all the time, why not software too?

But that's exactly the same than for orphaned packages? They may be 
unorphaned...

> The distinction should be made (between orphan of dropped/retired) based 
> on the upstream at the time a packager abandons a package.

If it is just an informational distinction, then it may only be in the
orphan pages in the comment?
 
> See above. It becomes the responsibility of the packager to determine 
> which branches get pushed out too.

Sorry but I don't get it...

Maybe to make things clearer I'll propose the following scenarios, hoping
to catch all the possibilities. I consider that FCn is the current FC
release, FCn+1 is devel, and next releases, FCn-x is the first release
that is associated with a fedora core eol (n-x = 3 today), FCn-z is the 
first release to be associated with a fedora core eol which has been dropped
from fedora core legacy.

I take as granted that no package is maintained for version FCn-z and older.
I also assume that an extras package maintainer has to take care of version 
FCn.

I see the following possibility:

1) A maintainer don't want to maintain a package in extras for any version
2) A maintainer don't want to maintain a package in extras for FCn+1 and newer 
3) A maintainer don't want to maintain a package in extras for FCn-x and older
4) A maintainer don't want to maintain a package in extras for FCn-1 and older

For me the first one is an orphaned package. The other are not orphaned
packages, but a co-maintainer is needed for versions that the primary
maintainer don't want to maintain. A difference could be made for packages
where a version allread exists for FCn-1 and older and those where
such a version doesn't exist, but I don't think it is the issue here.

In that picture I see the unmaintainable packages as a special case of
2), because in other cases the package allready exist, so it cannot
be unmaintainable. It may also be a special case of 1) as 1) implies 2).
But I fail to see why they deserve a specific treatment.



Now another question is what to do with existing packages for unmaintained
version. Should the built rpms be removed from the repo? This is an 
interesting question but that question seems to me to be unrelated to the 
other questions. I believe they shouldn't be removed from the repo, but
that's just my personal opinion.

--
Pat