Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 600249
Please consider explicitly documenting end of life applications (and deprecate before removing)
Last modified: 2011-10-11 11:05:19 EDT
Description of problem: The Fedora 12 standard for simple backups was "Simple Backup", and in Fedora 13 it became Deja Dup. The release notes for Fedora 13 mentioned the change of the standard but offered no advice on transitioning from one to the other. I can live with that. However it was not until I installed Fedora 13 that I realized that "Simple Backup" was no longer in the repository. Suddenly I had half a Terabyte of backup data that was unusable. This situation was exacerbated by the fact that I installed Fedora 13 after a catastrophic disk failure and was relying on my backups to become productive again. I worked around that problem and later I was shown where to find Simple Backup on Koji so I do not need anything in the short term. I do, however, respectfully request that in future when replacing one solution with another you allow both to exist in the repositories for 6 months and document in the release notes and in the Yum/Packagekit data that application X is deprecated, only there for backwards compatibility, will disappear on the next release and is replaced by application Y (This does not just apply to backups, but to any application which is replaced by another one) Thanks...
The problem is the Release Notes captures significant changes in software and not changes in categories of software. So when a default program for a category changes we sometimes don't capture migration or what happened to the previous default. In essence, we are only capturing half of the changes, the what, and not the 'what now'. I think we need to interface better with RELENG to better grab these changes.
Rahul championed the inclusion of Deja Dup, so perhaps he has some insight into where we can get appropriate documentation for this particular case. The reporter has an excellent point, which is that in the future we need to consider migration docs for any default applications that change.
Actually Fedora up until 13 did not have any standard graphical backup utility at all. In cases where we have replaced one program with another, we have always taken care to note it.
In general, we try to catch obsoleted packages, but the documentation team rarely has any insight into these unless developers specifically update the wiki. Since obsoleted packages are often orphaned, there is rarely a developer to provide this information at release time.