How to remove a package at end of life

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

Procedure

Please execute the following steps in the order indicated.

1. Make sure the package is properly Obsoleted/Provided by something if it is being replaced, see Renaming/Replacing Guidelines. If not, go on to the next step.
2. Run fedpkg retire MSG. This will recursively remove all files, then add a dead.package file to git. This should be done for master and sometimes the branched release if it has not yet released (Do not do this for released Fedora versions as there's no way to remove the package from end-user's systems) . The MSG parameter is a message which should briefly explain where this package went ('Obsolete package', 'Renamed to bar' or the like) and will be written in the dead.package file.
3. git rm all files in the other branches only if there are special factors at work, like licensing issues, or package being removed completely from Fedora.
4. Remove the package from comps if it is listed.
5. Check for and remove the package from any spins kickstarts files: http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/spin-kickstarts.git
6. Do not execute this step if you have not already completed steps 2 and 3, otherwise you will have to ask a provenpackager to perform those steps for you. Mark the package as "retired" in the package database system: log in with your FAS credentials, go to the page for your package, and click the Retire package button for each branch on which you are retiring the package.
7. If the package was registered on Upstream_release_monitoring, remove it from that page
8. File a ticket for rel-eng (component koji) asking the package (or packages if there are many) to be blocked from the appropriate collections in which it is retired. You can mention several packages in one ticket.

EPEL

Note that you can use this process for EPEL as well with a few differences:

• You can remove the package from any EPEL branch whether or not it has been released.
• The component for the rel-eng ticket is epel rather than koji.

For example, if your package has been added to base RHEL in RHEL-6.4 then perform the steps above but use the el6 branch instead of master. When you open your rel-eng ticket to have the package blocked, use component epel instead of koji.