Ben Beasley wrote:
There are other valid reasons to deprecate packages. Upstream
deprecation is one of them.
IMHO, it is not. Packages that are not actively maintained upstream tend to
be very little maintenance effort in Fedora, because there are no new
upstream releases to pick up. You just need to keep the package compiling
and address security issues. Sure, there are packages where either or both
of these is impractical, in which case the package should just get orphaned
and eventually retired. But planning for the package removal before this is
even an issue, just because upstream deprecated the package, does not make
sense. It can prevent useful software from entering Fedora just due to the
upstream maintenance state of a single (possibly even transitive)
dependency, whose impending removal from Fedora is entirely unnecessary.
And I am speaking from experience there, as one of the people keeping the
Qt/kdelibs 3 and 4 stacks working for legacy applications to use. Those are
a lot less work to maintain than the current KDE Frameworks that need to be
updated to a new upstream release every month or so.
Kevin Kofler