Adam Williamson wrote:
pkgdb had an API endpoint, 'collections', which was useful as
a
reliable source of information about available Fedora releases and
their status. It still exists now, until pkgdb is entirely turned off:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/api/collections/
but as pkgdb was made read-only on August 4th, its data is outdated. It
shows Fedora 24 as 'active' (rather than 'EOL'), and it has not had
Fedora 27 added (as would usually be the case when it branched).
[snip]
Of course, the 'natural' response to this would be to rewrite
things
that use the pkgdb collections API to use PDC instead. However, there's
a problem with that: PDC does not provide sufficient data. Releases in
PDC can only be marked as "active" or "inactive". It seems EOL
releases
are marked "inactive" and both stable and under-development releases
are marked "active" - so it is literally not possible to tell from PDC
whether a release is stable or Branched (e.g. right now, both Fedora 26
and Fedora 27 are simply 'active').
It's always the same story in Fedora (both on the infrastructure side and in
the distro itself): working software gets decommissioned before there is a
complete replacement and before consumers of the APIs are updated to use
whatever should be the replacement.
And then we are surprised when reviewers call Fedora a "bleeding-edge
distro" or a "RHEL beta".
Kevin Kofler