garbage-collector.rpm ? (Was: Re: Summary - Broken dependencies in Fedora Extras - 2007-03-03)

[Jesse Keating]

On Sunday 11 March 2007 15:39:53 Callum Lerwick wrote:
> Ummm, how about we just do something like debian does. Say we have a
> package, "foo-1.0-1.fc6" that has been dropped. Release a new version of
> the package, "foo-1.0-2.fc6" that is a dummy package that contains
> nothing, and has a %description along the lines of "Package foo is
> obsolete. This is a dummy package that ensures its removal. This package
> can be removed safely."

Why do we want to go out of our way to remove potentially still usable 
software from people's machines?  Just because Fedora doesn't maintain it 
anymore doesn't mean it automatically becomes unusable software that we 
should forcibly remove from people's machines.

Seriously folks, we have tools like yum list extras that can show us things 
that won't get updated by our configured repositories, and we should let the 
local user decide what to do about packages that have been orphaned.  We can 
keep up websites for the package in question with simple info that it is 
orphaned, click here to revive it type thing, but automatically removing it 
seems like a very rude thing to me.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Release Engineer: Fedora
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