From Fedora Project Wiki

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 think 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

  1. Announce on devel which package you want to orphan.
  2. Log into the Package Database and select the package you want to orphan.
  3. Press the "Release Ownership" button for each active branch that you want to orphan.

Claiming Ownership of an Orphaned Package Procedure

  1. Check why the package was orphaned by looking for the email to devel and checking dead.package in the SCM (url like: https://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=orphaned_package_name_here.git;a=blob;f=dead.package ).
  2. Announce on devel which packages you would like to become the owner of.
  3. Log into the Package Database and select the package you want to become the owner of.
  4. Press the "Take Ownership" button for each active branch that you want to maintain.
  5. Take over and join (or re-assign to you) open bug reports in bugzilla where package owner's attention is needed.
Re-review required for older packages
If a package was last updated more than three months ago (running git log *.spec can show you this information), you will need to submit a review request (a new bugzilla ticket) 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 the SCM, 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, 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. There may be additional issues with retired packages. Consult with the former maintainer for more information. The process is a bit different from unorphaning a package

  1. See if you can figure out why the package was retired including searching for information about orphaned packages on devel mailing list or emailing the former maintainer
  2. Announce on devel which packages you would like to become the owner of.
    1. At the moment, most retired packages fall under the "orphaned for more than three months" rule so they need a rereview.
  3. Open a package SCM admin request (if applicable, after the rereview, in the new rereview ticket) to assign ownership to you.
  4. When the cvsadmin assigns the package to you it should unretire the package as well. If the package status still says "Deprecated", "Retired", or "Orphaned" instead of "Approved", you could have encountered a bug. Please open a ticket on https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infratructure/ and assign it to "toshio" or contact toshio via irc: abadger1999, or one of the mailing lists (infrastructure list or devel list)

Lists of Orphan and Retired Packages

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