#6127 send direct e-mails to (co)maintainers of orphaned packages
Closed: Fixed None Opened 9 years ago by pnemade.

Currently What I understood, email comes on epel-devel list which says like "Orphaned Packages in epel5 (2015-03-14)" and then followed by actual package removal. This is not giving a sufficient time for people to read such generic email.

I suggest email personally to people which get affected by such package removals. e.g. when time comes to remove orphaned packages, pick such packages one by one, generate report what other owned packages also be removed. Email such owned packages people that their package will be picked for removal in next 3-7 days. Leave the further decision to those people. They can either find someone to own dependent orphaned package or own it themselves.


This is not what happened, the announcements for the orphaned packages I retired today were sent in December 2014/January 2015, so there was plenty of time to pick them up, e.g. fedora-packager which seem to have caused problems for you was announced to be removed on 2015-01-23:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/epel-devel/2015-January/010770.html

However, fontpackages was introduced again into EPEL after this announcement:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=610973

So this is a kind of race-condition that should IMHO be prevented by taskotron for example by warning/blocking packages getting into a stable repo if they depend on something that is orphaned.

I will still say improve this process by sending emails to each affected people. The taskotron comes later in picture.

Also, What is the use of removal of package when there are more than one co-maintainers, better send them also personal email that package is orphaned and now either of them can become package admin.

So, Good to remove those packages where actually no (co-)owners exists.

Replying to [comment:4 pnemade]:

Also, What is the use of removal of package when there are more than one co-maintainers, better send them also personal email that package is orphaned and now either of them can become package admin.

Every (co)maintainer listed in the reports already gets a direct copy of the email.

So, Good to remove those packages where actually no (co-)owners exists.

Most of the time the comaintainers do not care.

Thanks but what about the requested feature in comment#4 ? You should send full package report affected to all such users. Like I own fontpackages, How would I know rpmdevtools is orphaned and is going to be removed? Please again don't ask to read generic emails.

Replying to [comment:6 pnemade]:

Thanks but what about the requested feature in comment#4 ? You should send full package report affected to all such users. Like I own fontpackages, How would I know rpmdevtools is orphaned and is going to be removed? Please again don't ask to read generic emails.

When I sent the e-mail, fontpackages was not yet built, therefore the scripts was not able to determine whether it depends on other packages or not. If it was already built, then you will get a copy of the e-mail and it contains an entry that shows you that you need to adopt rpmdevtools, if rpmdevtools is the reason why fontpackages will be retired.

So if you look at
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/epel-devel/2015-January/010770.html
ralph got a copy of the e-mail directly, which indicates that one of his packages is affected, this is mentioned in the e-mail. Then if ralph searches for his fas name, he will find for example this line:

ralph: zope, python26-distribute, python-paver

This shows that he needs to adopt the three packages to packages to be retired he is affected by. If he wants to know which packages will be retired, he just needs to check which packages that depend on zope will be retired.

So if you built fontpackages before I sent the e-mail, then you would have gotten a direct e-mail which shows you that you need to adopt all the orphaned dependencies for fontpackages to keep it from being retired.

If in your opinion the description or format of the mail should be changed, please provide a patch or example text, otherwise I do not know how to improve it.

Again you are giving the same (for me it looks) unrelated reference of January epel-devel email. Note you ran the script without checking what got re-imported in epel5. I re-imported fontpackages because there were 2 reasons

1) font packages was removed due to this

2) https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/fonts-bugs/2015-January/027474.html

What Robert suggested there is the later thing as rpmdevetools itself caused the issues of removal of font packages. What I know is that your script has wasted my time of re-importing the fontpackages. You should first add more validations before running any such scripts and not to ask package maintainers to provide patches.

I don't know why you emphasize so much on removal of orphaned packages.

May I know why there is no owner shown for fontpackages and devjavu-fonts in https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/epel-devel/2015-March/010968.html ? That report referenced build fontpackages-devel-1.44-1.el5.2.noarch which is completed by me, see http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=610973

Re-importing packages is not a big issues but Dennis insisted re-review of such packages and then there will be no review or reviewer for some time. You should also invest some time in re-reviewing such removed packages. All this process is a big pain.

Replying to [comment:8 pnemade]:

Again you are giving the same (for me it looks) unrelated reference of January epel-devel email. Note you ran the script without checking what got re-imported in epel5. I re-imported fontpackages because there were 2 reasons

In January I retired python26-distribute because nobody adopted it, Recently I mainly retired packages that had broken dependencies since then or before then, i.e. packages that cannot be properly installed or built again.

1) font packages was removed due to this

2) https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/fonts-bugs/2015-January/027474.html

What Robert suggested there is the later thing as rpmdevetools itself caused the issues of removal of font packages. What I know is that your script has wasted my time of re-importing the fontpackages. You should first add more validations before running any such scripts and not to ask package maintainers to provide patches.

There would be no need for this if you or whoever just adopted the orphaned packages.

I don't know why you emphasize so much on removal of orphaned packages.

It makes sure that nobody installs packages from EPEL that are not really maintained and might contain unhandled security issues, see for example ticket:5963.

May I know why there is no owner shown for fontpackages and devjavu-fonts in https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/epel-devel/2015-March/010968.html ? That report referenced build fontpackages-devel-1.44-1.el5.2.noarch which is completed by me, see http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=610973

I ran the script that created the report after I cleaned up broken dependencies.

Re-importing packages is not a big issues but Dennis insisted re-review of such packages and then there will be no review or reviewer for some time. You should also invest some time in re-reviewing such removed packages. All this process is a big pain.

You do not need a re-review if it is unretired within two weeks.

Replying to [comment:9 till]:

Replying to [comment:8 pnemade]:

Again you are giving the same (for me it looks) unrelated reference of January epel-devel email. Note you ran the script without checking what got re-imported in epel5. I re-imported fontpackages because there were 2 reasons

In January I retired python26-distribute because nobody adopted it, Recently I mainly retired packages that had broken dependencies since then or before then, i.e. packages that cannot be properly installed or built again.

1) font packages was removed due to this

2) https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/fonts-bugs/2015-January/027474.html

What Robert suggested there is the later thing as rpmdevetools itself caused the issues of removal of font packages. What I know is that your script has wasted my time of re-importing the fontpackages. You should first add more validations before running any such scripts and not to ask package maintainers to provide patches.

There would be no need for this if you or whoever just adopted the orphaned packages.

That is why I am saying send individual personal emails (not the complete report) that just shows what packages for that person will be removed and what other packages he need to own.

I don't know why you emphasize so much on removal of orphaned packages.

It makes sure that nobody installs packages from EPEL that are not really maintained and might contain unhandled security issues, see for example ticket:5963.

Okay. I got this why you remove the orphaned packages.

May I know why there is no owner shown for fontpackages and devjavu-fonts in https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/epel-devel/2015-March/010968.html ? That report referenced build fontpackages-devel-1.44-1.el5.2.noarch which is completed by me, see http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=610973

I ran the script that created the report after I cleaned up broken dependencies.

How will this help if you will directly remove the packages and then send the report that some packages removed due to some other orphaned packages and do not give sufficient time for people to consume that information? If I would have notified personally with just the related information to me, I could have taken rpmdevtools package.

Re-importing packages is not a big issues but Dennis insisted re-review of such packages and then there will be no review or reviewer for some time. You should also invest some time in re-reviewing such removed packages. All this process is a big pain.

You do not need a re-review if it is unretired within two weeks.

See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Orphaned_package_that_need_new_maintainers#Claiming_Ownership_of_a_Retired_Package and you will find point 3 there saying "To unretire a EPEL branch if the package is still in Fedora, no re-review is required." and still unretire process asked me to re-review the package as it was more than 2 weeks.

Can you people decide on what should be the real policy wordings here and follow that exactly?

Replying to [comment:10 pnemade]:

How will this help if you will directly remove the packages and then send the report that some packages removed due to some other orphaned packages and do not give sufficient time for people to consume that information? If I would have notified personally with just the related information to me, I could have taken rpmdevtools package.

I never retired rpmdevtools. fontpackages was retired for reasons unrelated to rpmdevtools - the actual reason was mentioned in the dead.package file in GIT. However, due to caching/timing the report script did not yet know that fontpackages was already retired when it checked the consequences of retiring rpmdevtools. Maybe this makes it a little clearer for you.

See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Orphaned_package_that_need_new_maintainers#Claiming_Ownership_of_a_Retired_Package and you will find point 3 there saying "To unretire a EPEL branch if the package is still in Fedora, no re-review is required." and still unretire process asked me to re-review the package as it was more than 2 weeks.

Can you people decide on what should be the real policy wordings here and follow that exactly?

To my knowledge, the wiki is correct. However it might still happen that someone forgets the details since we are not perfect. I assumed that there was no Fedora branch since you mentioned that no needed a re-review earlier. So if you notice a contradiction in the wiki policy description and the actual actions, please make sure to resolve the issues by mentioning them/updating the wiki.

Replying to [comment:11 till]:

Replying to [comment:10 pnemade]:

How will this help if you will directly remove the packages and then send the report that some packages removed due to some other orphaned packages and do not give sufficient time for people to consume that information? If I would have notified personally with just the related information to me, I could have taken rpmdevtools package.

I never retired rpmdevtools. fontpackages was retired for reasons unrelated to rpmdevtools - the actual reason was mentioned in the dead.package file in GIT. However, due to caching/timing the report script did not yet know that fontpackages was already retired when it checked the consequences of retiring rpmdevtools. Maybe this makes it a little clearer for you.

So, you still think no improvement is needed for orphaned package script? You said caching/timing issue right? What I understood is that you did these things in parallel, ran the package retirement script and same time report is generated and sent. Good in future if this script will show actual package owners and not orphan.

Also, you are right rpmdevtools is never retired and I got confused by the output by orphaned package script as I was already knowing fedora-packager is retired.

    fontpackages (maintained by: orphan)
            fontpackages-devel-1.44-1.el5.2.noarch requires rpmdevtools = 6.8-1.el5
            fontpackages-tools-1.44-1.el5.2.noarch requires fedora-packager = 0.5.9.2-1.el5

See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Orphaned_package_that_need_new_maintainers#Claiming_Ownership_of_a_Retired_Package and you will find point 3 there saying "To unretire a EPEL branch if the package is still in Fedora, no re-review is required." and still unretire process asked me to re-review the package as it was more than 2 weeks.

Can you people decide on what should be the real policy wordings here and follow that exactly?

To my knowledge, the wiki is correct. However it might still happen that someone forgets the details since we are not perfect. I assumed that there was no Fedora branch since you mentioned that no needed a re-review earlier. So if you notice a contradiction in the wiki policy description and the actual actions, please make sure to resolve the issues by mentioning them/updating the wiki.

So no discussion needed among rel-eng people? Note, just because of this confusion the re-review of fontpackages took some time. So, I need a clarification on whether EPEL branch (provided package is available in Fedora) will need a package re-review or not as we can see in future package retirement script running frequently and this issue may arise again.

People are continuously getting confused by the email report for orphaned packages/ftbfs packages.....

Replying to [comment:13 pnemade]:

People are continuously getting confused by the email report for orphaned packages/ftbfs packages.....

Do you have an idea about how to make the report less confusing?

I think the confusion can be cleared using the idea suggested by Michael in https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-July/212387.html

Can this be implemented please?

thanks.

Metadata Update from @pnemade:
- Issue set to the milestone: Fedora 22 Beta

7 years ago

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