= phenomenon =
When Fedora is branched from Rawhide, orphaned packages are retired. It is unclear whether only long time orphaned packages are retired or even packages that have been orphaned very recently. This happen regardless whether there are still co-maintainers for that package.
= background analysis =
Co-maintainers might not notice that a package was orphaned, because they can still maintain the package properly without any problems, see for example radeontool: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/acls/name/radeontool Also packages are sometimes orphaned without a a notification being send by pkgdb, see http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/166481/focus=166541
= implementation recommendation =
Usually there are very restritive requirements for orphaning packages from a non-responsive maintainer, for example there need to be several contact attempts. To retire packages from active co-maintainers, there are less requirements, even though a package retirement is much more disturbing. Therefore I suggest to require at least the same amount of communication attempts with co-maintainers when their package is to be retired as it is required for the non-responsive maintainer policy.
I would be happy to automatically assign them to comaintainers, if pkgdb had an interface to do so. That seems simpler.
PackageDB did that at one time (for all packages) but that proved to be unwanted in enough cases that we disabled it. The current trunk has code that will allow selecting a specific maintainer instead of simply "myself" or "orphan" with the comaintainers of a package explicitly listed. There's a lot of work needed to get the trunk into shape for a release, though, and I've been side tracked into working on a large variety of things that aren't pkgdb, unfortunately. So there's no ETA on when we could get that feature deployed.
From 2012-07-16 FESCo meeting: * AGREED: notting (or other person doing this task) will CC: comaintainers on orphan mails (notting, 17:20:29)
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