On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 05:15:37PM +0000, Gary Buhrmaster wrote:
I am in favor of the intention that when you upgrade,
those packages from previous releases are removed
automagically.
How will you know it is going away? When you discover the software
missing post-upgrade?
After an upgrade I typically expect
the system and packages to be supported and
maintained in the same way as if I installed new.
User/Admin customizations are expected to be retained post-upgrade, and
software installed after the fact absolutely counts as a customization,
no matter where that software came from.
I'm talking about stuff that got installed because the user explicitly
asked for it, not because it got pulled in as a dependency.
And what about non-Fedora software? That can break an upgrade too, are
we going to automagically remove that stuff too? If not, Fedora will
still going to have to handle those upgrade failures gracefully.
FD: I spend time after every upgrade to remove old
retired packages, and not having to doing so would
make life easier.
I spend time before every upgrade enumerating the things that are
expected to break in the upgrade, and tackling those issues pre-upgrade
or staging things so I can do it post-upgrade. Getting the list of
packages that triggere pre-upgrade failures is a big help in that regard.
After every upgrade, as well as tackling the known breakages, I also
have to deal with the stuff that unexpectedly broke. Which, to Fedora's
credit, is pretty rare these days.
But. I cannot strongly object enough to automatically uninstalling a
package solely because it was retired, because "retired" does not mean
"broken".
A reasonable argument for automagic removal can be made for packages
that will break due to an unmet dependency, but ultimately the user is
the only one who can determine if proceeding is okay or not. And to
determine that, they need to be suitably informed.
- Solomon
--
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