On Mon, Jun 3, 2019 at 11:07 AM Adam Williamson
<adamwill@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 2019-06-02 at 21:35 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> > Perhaps related, on an upgraded Fedora 30 system I see
> > ghostscript-fonts-5.50-37.fc27.noarch, which does not appear on any
> > clean installed systems, and also can't be installed (Error: Unable to
> > find a match ). That tells me it's been dropped or is obsolete, so is
> > it normal for such packages to persist through upgrades?
>
> Sure, very common. Packages are frequently retired and not formally
> obsoleted by anything else: in this case, if you have them installed,
> they'll stay installed until some dependency issue crops up and you
> have to remove them manually (or use --allowerasing) to clear it up.
And does gnome-software do --allowerasing, or equivalent? Or other behavior?
>
> Some people don't see any problem with this, personally it drives me
> crazy and I wish it were policy that *every* retired package must be
> obsoleted. But it isn't.
Not obsoleting retired packages is arguably inconsistent with the
Workstation PRD:
"Upgrading the system multiple times through the upgrade process
should give a result that is the same as an original install of Fedora
Workstation."
I understand that is a goal, not a policy or release criterion.
I expect it is an impossible goal as it is making the installer guess that you didn't want to keep that version of wumpus from RHL6.2 which works still but isn't in the repository. And forcing an obsolete has knock-on effects. At best I can obsolete the version of emacs-freebird which came from Fedora up until release N, but if the person has a version they compile themselves.. then a centralized obsoletes has a good chance of removing it unless the packager did exactly the right things in the obsoletes and the other version of emacs-freebird also did the right things. I expect that instead you end up with a lot of pissed off people... which no one has the emotional labour to deal with.
--
Chris Murphy
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