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

[Gianluca Sforna]

On 3/11/07, Callum Lerwick <seg at haxxed.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-03-05 at 17:43 +0100, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > Matthew Miller schrieb:
> > > What about implementing it as a yum plugin instead? The plugin could key off
> > > of the old and versions of fedora-release and act accordingly.
> >
> > Hmm. Yes, maybe that could work, too.
>
> 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."
>
> If the package is ever revived, you just have to release "foo-1.0-3.fc6"
> or "foo-6.3-7.fc11" or whatever. It will then be neatly revived on any
> system that the user hasn't explicitly removed the dummy package.
> External repos can easily pick up the package as well. Just bump the
> version.
>

Looks very sane to me, and also pretty doable in a (semi)automatic way
when a given package is dropped/orphaned/whatever