On 02/19/2016 08:13 AM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
On 18 February 2016 at 19:16, ~Stack~ <i.am.stack(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> On 02/18/2016 06:29 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>> On 18 February 2016 at 14:13, ~Stack~ <i.am.stack(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On 02/18/2016 01:56 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 23:24:58 -0700
>>>> Stephen John Smoogen <smooge(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>> [snip]
>>>>> 1. Packages will never disappear. [They don't disappear from
Fedora 12
>>>>> even if it is archived.. ]
>>>>
>>>> To my understanding we never made this promise. We should try and
>>>> communicate why it's NOT something we promise.
>>>
>>> Could you elaborate on this please? I have asked before, but didn't
>>> really get an answer. I don't understand this.
>>>
>>
>> Software in EPEL follows many of the same rules as software in Fedora.
>> If there isn't an active maintainer the software is removed. This is
>> because a lot of people expect that the software is going to be
>> getting updates and bug fixes when it is there. If it isn't there it
>> is clear that it isn't getting any bug fixes.
>>
>> While as a user this is a major pain in the butt, on the other side
>> (maintainers and developers of the software) it is a major pain when
>> the opposite occurs. Developers get complaints about software they no
>> longer have any interest in and try to find someone to get rid of the
>> old software. People who are maintainers of other packages get long
>> hate emails about why is this software still in XYZ repository if no
>> one is going to care about it. It burnt out a lot of the early
>> repository people because they had made a package for someone at some
>> point but really didn't have any care for it to be there any longer
>> but all they were getting was crap for it being there.
>
> Thanks for replying. Makes sense. But what would the harm be to move a
> package into a separate "retired" repo? Community would know that it
> isn't maintained and yet the package wouldn't just disappear completely.
> I guess the difficult question would then be, how long is the package
> kept till it needs to be pruned? 1yr? 6mo? Still, it would be nice to
> give the user base the option to pull the packages they need out on a
> long enough scale that they have time to discover it with new builds.
>
So every package ever signed is still in the koji build server if you
know where to look for it. However I am hoping next week to write up
some proposals that could accomplish this.
> I also wonder how many people have been bit by this. I know I have
> supplied packages out of my repos for others before, but it has only
> been a handful. It seems to have bitten me several times in the last
> year and all were for EL6, but (fingers crossed) I am done with the EL6
> boxes in <2yrs with a full migration to either EL7 or Ubuntu LTS and
> won't need the EL6 repo any more. :-)
>
A lot of people have been bit as it is nearly a daily occurrence in
#epel on the irc server.
> Thanks again!
> ~Stack~
My first comment is that I think we need to do better communication, as I
don't think an announcement goes out to epel-users when a package is going to
be retired.
My proposal would be to:
- When building against RHEL X.Y, the epel packages end up in epel/X.Y with a
symbolic link of epel/X -> epel/X.Y.
- The last two versions are in
http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel, with
older ones retired to
http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/epel
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