[elrepo-devel] Deprecating packages

[Alan Bartlett]

On 6 March 2010 20:38, Phil Perry <phil at elrepo.org> wrote:

> This raises the question of how we go about deprecating an ELRepo kmod.
>
> On IRC we briefly discussed a few options:
>
> 1. Announce to the ML that the package is deprecated and recommend the
> user 'rpm -e kmod-foo' removes the package in favour of the kernel
> module (as of kernel > X)
>
> 2. Release a self-destructing kmod update.
> Release an updated package with Requires kernel > 2.6.18-xyz.el5 (so
> that users staying with older kernels don't get the update) that doesn't
> contain the .conf override and thus allows the kernel module to become
> the default.
>
> 3. Release an update identical to the driver in RHEL.
> This doesn't appear to solve the issue, only delays it - the same issue
> arises when the driver gets updated down the line.
>
> Opinions?

I am more in favour of option 1. Indeed that is the method I used,
once RHEL 5.4 was released, with the kmod-ath5k & kmod-mac80211
packages. I would prefer a system administrator to retain complete
control of { her | his } system and not expect me to do anything for {
her | him } other than advise that a "yum remove kmod-phoo" or "rpm -e
kmod-phoo" for when kernel > 2.6.18-blah-blah.el5 is installed.

Alan.