Fedora

Revision as of 21:55, 22 February 2009

When a package reaches the end of its useful life, the following steps will let other people -- and automated processes! -- know both not to expect any more releases, and why it was removed. The process is simple.

For this example, we'll remove the package foo.

1. Make sure the package is properly Obsoleted/Provided by something if it is being replaced, see Renaming/Replacing Guidelines.
2. Add a dead.package file to CVS in affected foo/* branches (usually foo/devel only). The contents of this file should briefly explain where this package went: 'Obsolete package.', 'Renamed to bar' or the like.
3. cvs rm all the other files in the foo/* branches that you added dead.package to. This should help make it clearly obvious what's going on here. It's not necessary to remove the files in other branches, unless there are other factors at work. (e.g., licensing issue, package being removed completely from Fedora.)
4. Remove the package from comps if it is listed.
5. Mark the package as "retired" on Retired Packages . Do not mark the package this way if it is just being renamed in some but not all distro branches.
6. File a ticket for rel-eng asking the package to be blocked from the appropriate collections in which it is retired.