About Orphan and Retired Packages
When Fedora maintainers do not want or are not able to maintain a package any longer, they can orphan or retire the package. When they thinks that the package is still useful for Fedora, they should orphan it. Then other maintainers that are interested in maintaining it, can take ownership of this package. In case the package is no longer useful for Fedora, e.g. because it was renamed, upstream does not exist anymore, then it should be retired.
Orphaning Procedure
- Announce on fedora-devel-list which package you want to orphan.
- Log into the Package Database and select the package you want to orphan.
- Press the "Release Ownership" button for each active branch that you want to orphan.
Claiming Ownership of an Orphaned Package Procedure
- Check why the package was orphaned by looking for the email to fedora-devel-list and checking dead.package in CVS (url like: http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/orphaned_package_name_here/devel/dead.package ).
- Announce on fedora-devel-list which packages you would like to become the owner of.
- Log into the Package Database and select the package you want to become the owner of.
- Press the "Take Ownership" button for each active branch that you want to maintain.
- Take over and join (or re-assign to you) open bug reports in bugzilla where package owner's attention is needed.
If a package was last updated more than three months ago (running cvs log -r HEAD *.spec can show you this information), you will need to submit a review request and have the package approved by a reviewer as if it were new to Fedora. See the package review process for more information. There are a couple of small changes though, be sure to submit a 'update' request to 'cvs', and before you will be able to run the final 'make build' commands you will need to file a ticket w/ release engineering to unblock your package https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/newticket
Claiming Ownership of a Retired Package
If you really want to maintain a retired package, then the process is much the same as claiming an orphaned package. However, you need to be aware that fixing release critical bugs etc becomes your responsibility. This is to ensure the high quality and standards of packaging remain for Fedora package collection.
Lists of Orphan and Retired Packages
- Currently orphan packages (also contains some retired packages).
- Retired packages (not up to date, is missing packages from the wiki list).
- Retired packages (wiki) (not up to date, may not contain packages that are in the orphan package list, but are actually retired).