About Orphan and Retired (Deprecated) 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. But this is only possible for development releases such as Branched or Rawhide.
Orphaned packages remain in stable releases and are the responsibility of the collective packaging community to maintain.
Orphan packages will be retired if they remain orphaned for six weeks.
We encourage maintainers considering orphaning their packages to do it as early in the development cycle as possible. Shortly after the prior release is branched is a good time.
Orphaning Procedure
- Announce on devel 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 devel.
- Announce on devel 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.
Claiming Ownership of a Retired Package
If you really want to maintain a retired package, you need to be aware that if upstream is dead, 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. If possible, consult with the former maintainer for more information. The process is a bit different from unorphaning a package
- 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. You can also check dead.package in the SCM (url like: https://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/package_name_here.git/tree/dead.package)
- Announce on devel which packages you would like to become the owner of.
- Retired Fedora packages (master/devel/rawhide branch retired) require a re-review if they are retired for more than two weeks or if there is no previous review of the package. 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. To unretire a EPEL branch if the package is still in Fedora, no re-review is required.
- Open a package SCM admin request after the rereview, in the new rereview ticket (or existing one if the rereview is not required per the previous clause) to assign ownership to you.
- When the SCM admin assigns the package to you it should unretire the package as well. If the package status still says "Deprecated" or "Orphaned" instead of "Approved", you could have encountered a bug. Please open a ticket on https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ and assign it to "toshio" or contact toshio via irc: abadger1999, or one of the mailing lists (infrastructure list or devel list)
- Request that Release Engineering team unblock the package for the current release, via their trac instance. In this request, please post a link to the completed re-review.
Lists of Orphan and Retired Packages
- Orphan packages: Rawhide/master, EPEL 5, EPEL 6, EPEL 7
- Deprecated packages (not up to date, a complete list is currently not publicly available).