package EOL

[Patrice Dumas]

> > I am not sure if other agree on that approach or not.

I do agree. If a packager wants to do it he shouldn't be discouraged
(nor encouraged...).

> No. I'm not in favour of this approach. IMO, it's actually what has kept
> Debian back as a distro. They have *way* too much legacy hanging around
> them which makes build times and build sizes insanely huge. I know I've

I don't see that as an issue for fedora extras. The buildsys is rarely
fully used. For the build size I don't know. Maybe it delays syncing
to the mirrors, maybe it eats too much disk? However I guess it isn't 
due to old apps.

> fixed bugs on a few packages I package for FE on z88dk (especially) and
> have submitted them to the authors. However, doing this then starts to
> eat into other work.
> 
> Sure it's fun, but is it worth it - especially if the upstream
> maintainer has dropped the package?

It may no be worth it, but it should be up to the packager to decide
(that's different from the issue of orphans/unmaintained packages).

> Hard one. You can't go on version number or time. Possible answer is if
> there is a development branch, if that's dead then the package is
> possibly/probably dead.

It doesn't mean that it shouldn't be packaged. It may be dead because there
isn't anything to improve.

> > My point was more, why orphan it if the general consensus is to drop it? 
> > Should it not be placed in a "dropped" list or something?
> 
> Again. lends weight to my point about the FL branch. If it's dropped
> into Legacy and you want to bring it back to a current branch, that's
> not a problem, but if it's in Legacy it can be effectively considered
> dropped.

Orphaned packages that weren't dependencies for other packages have
been dropped from FE5 (if I remember correctly). I think it is right. 
They will completly disappear when FC5 move out of fedora legacy
(at least that was the plan, I believe).

But it should also be possible not to move on to the devel branch and
create a directory for the new release when there is a new fc release, 
even for non orphaned packages, if a packager think that it is not usefull
and nobody is willing to maintainn it for newer releases. I don't know if 
it is allready possible.

--
Pat