Fedora are looking for ways to better manage retired software packages

Fedora developers propose to introduce the concept of “fedora-retired-packages” in order to remove retired packages when upgrading Fedora.

Retired packages refer to packages that are not dependent on other packages, are no longer maintained upstream, and are no longer packaged by Fedora maintainers. The current treatment for these packages is that when Fedora is upgraded, these retired packages will still be installed even if the old RPM is installed.

Fedora itself already has the concept of “fedora-obsoletes-package”, which is used to eliminate packages that will cause problems during upgrades, but there is no concept for ordinary packages that are retired or no longer maintained.

For the current fedora-retired-packages proposal, it will eliminate the packages that are retired after the latest version is released, and then delete this package when upgrading. This proposal is fully explained on the Fedora Wiki.

Fedora developers have expressed different opinions on this proposal on their mailing list. Some people think that some users may want the retired software packages they install to remain in the system, so a better method is needed to handle this process. We might as well wait and see the Fedora 33 launched later this year.