#1620 Decide what to do when package is retired and nothing replaces it directly
Closed None Opened 7 years ago by rathann.

= phenomenon =
Initially filed as a FPC ticket: https://fedorahosted.org/fpc/ticket/645 . However, the FPC feels this is more of an engineering issue and asked for FESCo guidance. Without copying and pasting the whole FPC ticket, it can be summarized like this: when nothing obsoletes a retired package, distribution upgrade may break as the dependencies are no longer satisfied, like in ​https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1366793 . The submitter asked for a recommendation what to do in case nothing replaces a retired package directly.

= background analysis =
There is a number of options available, but I think they need to be evaluated on case-by-case basis.
1. The retired package X should be obsoleted by a (loosely) related package Y which is guaranteed to be present in all cases in which X was also present.
2. Add a distribution-wide metapackage whose sole purpose would be to obsolete retired packages with no direct successor.
3. Do nothing on the packaging side and implement a solution in the distribution upgrade tools (dnf system-upgrade?).

= implementation recommendation =
I think this should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.


Idea: collect the list of packages blocked in koji (those are essentially retired packages) and put that in the yum metadata. With this, dnf should have enough information to remove retired packages on distro upgrades.

From last meeting log, we can see this ticket was already discussed

accepted This is an intractable problem that has no common solution. Handle on a case by case basis.

(6:+ 0:- 0:0)

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