F36: CHANGE: Retired Packages

[dustymabe]

In the 2022-02-09 community meeting we decided to discuss further the following change:

• Retired Packages
  • Ease the task of removing packages, which were retired and no longer receives updates.
  • Tracking bug: #2018192

This change is more about yum based systems having a tool that will detect and remove retired packages when doing a major upgrade. While it doesn't apply directly to FCOS we decided to open this issue to further discussion around our own particular problem.

We believe that if a user has layered a package that then is retired and no longer exists it will yield them into a state where they won't be able to auto update (the upgrade will fail). Their auto-updating system is now stuck until user intervention is applied. We should discuss how to handle this.

[jlebon]

This is similar to coreos/rpm-ostree#3465. IMO, I think here too the right behaviour is to keep erroring out, but possibly provide a better error message.

[jlebon]

Closely related to this is the subject of monitoring and alerting. Zincati already has a Prometheus interface through which it could report these error conditions.

[dustymabe]

This is similar to coreos/rpm-ostree#3465. IMO, I think here too the right behaviour is to keep erroring out, but possibly provide a better error message.

Agree, but I think there was one further idea: coreos/console-login-helper-messages#107