Retire Orphaned Packages

Description

Every release prior to the Feature Freeze we purge all the orphans from the distribution. This keeps out unowned software and prevents future problems down the road.

The orphan process takes place in stages:

1. Detecting a list of orphans and the dependencies that will be broken if the orphans are removed.
2. Sending the list of potential orphans to devel@lists.fedoraproject.org for community review and removal from the orphan list.
3. Removing packages confirmed as orphans from the Fedora package respositories.

Detecting Orphans

A script called find-unblocked-orphans.py assits in the detection process. It should be run on a machine that has koji and python-fedora installed. It runs without options, and should take about a minute to complete.

find-unblocked-orphans.py is available in the Release Engineering git repo or downloaded from https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/browser/scripts/find-unblocked-orphans.py

Announcing Packages to be Orphaned

find-unglocked-orphans.pyoutputs text to stdout on the command line in a forma suitable for the body of an email message.

$ ./find-unblocked-orphans.py > email-message

Email the output to devel@lists.fedodraproject.org at least a week before the feature freeze. This gives maintainers an opportunity to pick up orphans that are important to them.

Blocking orphans

Once maintainers have been given an opportunity to pick up orphans, we need to do the blocking. Currently we don't have a script to do this, so we re-use the find-unblocked-orphans.py script to generate the list. The 'block-pkg' koji command is used to do the blocking.

$ koji block-pkg --help
Usage: koji block-pkg [options] tag package [package2 ...]
(Specify the --help global option for a list of other help options)

Options:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

This can take multiple packages and thus we can use the orphan list from the find command as input. We block packages from the latest dist-f## tag only, for example if we wished to block sbackup roxterm and uisp from rawhide during Fedora 13 development we would run:

$ koji block-pkg dist-f13 sbackup roxterm uisp

Verification

To verify that the packages were blocked correctly we can use the 'latest-pkg' koji action.

$ koji latest-pkg dist-f13 wdm

This should return nothing, as wdm is a blocked package.

Consider Before Running

Generally we block anything that doesn't leave any deps, but if there are orphans that are still depended on a second warning sent to devel@lists.fedoraproject.org and to <package>-owner@fedoraproject.org for each dep.

We give another couple of days for maintainers to take notice and pick up packages or rebuild their packages without needing the orphans. We don't like to create broken deps by purging orphans so every effort should be made to find owners or to fix deps.