BuildRoot Guidelines
Author: James Hogarth
Revision: 1
Initial Draft: Thursday October 26, 2017
Last Revised: Thursday October 26, 2017
Introduction
A few months ago an initiative was approved by FESCo and begun to remove the dependency on net-tools within the packages in Fedora.
https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/1711
History
There has already been a good start on this with several packages either already engaging upstream discussions or with adjustments made to remove the dependency in rawhide.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=1496100&hide_resolved=0
There are not that many packages left to go, and for many the dependency should be fairly trivially resolved, but it would be a shame to allow future packages to be introduced that would be a step back from this effort.
Although this specifically with net-tools in mind, we should make it generic and not name a specific package
Proposition
Where it has been agreed to deprecate a package then there should be steps in place to avoid, or at least track, adding to the tech debt in doing so.
The guidelines should have the Packaging:Guidelines#Package_Dependencies section updated to include the following section.
Deprecated Packages Dependencies
If FESCo has agreed to deprecate a package that this package depends on then the submitter SHOULD submit an issue to the upstream to avoid that dependency and MUST add a bugzilla ticket blocking the tracking bug for that deprecation so it can be tracked.