Re: obsolete package libpopt0 dependencies

[Mark Geisert <mark at maxrnd dot com>]

Doug Henderson writes:
> On 11 July 2016 at 14:56, Mark Geisert wrote:
> > Mark Geisert writes:
> >> Doug Henderson writes:
> >> > To the maintainer of cygutils and cygutils-extra,.
> >> >
> >> > Please rebuild these packages to not use the obsolete package
> > libpopt0.
> >> >
> >> > I found two other packages, libbonoboui2_0 and libgnome2_0 which 
also
> >> > depended on libpopt0, but I was able to uninstall them with no
> >> > difficult.
> >>
> >> Sorry for the inconvenience.  I'll look into this shortly.
> >
> > Not trying to avoid work :) but I hadn't heard that Cygwin's 
obsolete
> > package conventions could cause a problem for users.  What issue 
does it
> > cause for you?  Does it make packages hard to uninstall?  Does it 
pull in
> > other unwanted packages?  Any description of the undesirable 
behavior
> > would help me understand.
> 
> Out of curiosity, I checked for obsolete packages after seeing a
> recent post which suggested to remove obsolete packages while trying
> to diagnose and solve unusual problems. I think it was something to do
> with cygwin installs failing after Win10 upgrades.
> 
> One obsolete package uninstalled with no complaint, but setup reported
> that libpopt0 was used by the 4 packages I mentioned above.
> 
> I would presume that obsolete packages will not be maintained, and at
> some point may cease to function properly, resulting in the sudden
> failure of non-obsolete packages that depend on them.
> 
> With that in mind, I would suggest that dependence on an obsolete
> package is an important trigger for preparing a new release for a
> package.

OK, well said.  I agree with the potential pitfall you're concerned 
about.  We "lucked out" with libpopt0 because, though obsolete, it 
requires another package: popt.  The mechanism here allowed the popt 
library's previous name to be used by other packages until they're 
updated to refer to the new name.  No functionality was lost by 
obsoleting that particular old-named package.

I will update the cygutils* packages to refer directly to popt rather 
than libpopt0 but other maintainers will act on their own schedules.  
Problem reports do help with prioritizing, of course :).
Thanks for the report,

..mark





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