RE: What does mean 'obsolete' category?

["Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E]" <BBuchbinder@niaid.nih.gov>]

Oleksandr Gavenko sent the following at Saturday, November 05, 2011 7:37 PM
>Search:
>  http://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-grep.cgi?grep=xorg-x11-xwin
>
>take:
>  xorg-x11-xwin/xorg-x11-xwin-7.4-1  Obsolete package
>
From setup.ini:
>  @ xorg-x11-xwin
>  sdesc: "Obsolete package"
>  ldesc: "Obsolete package"
>  category: _obsolete
>
>That mean 'obsolete' for package?
>
>I search for docs in:
>  Cygwin Package Contributor's Guide
>  Cygwin User's Guide
>  http://sourceware.org/cygwin-apps/setup-head.ini.html
>
>but does not found any relevant docs for 'obsolete' keyword.
>
>Do this mean that package deprecated and I need avoid its uses?
>
>Or it is for a long time does not updated and can have known bugs?
>
>I will be glad if docs updated with appropriate texts.

They are how obsolete packages are removed and replaced by their successors.

Lets look at the setup.ini entry for ash.

@ ash
sdesc: "Replaced by dash"
ldesc: "OBSOLETE PKG: replaced by dash"
category: _obsolete
requires: dash cygwin
version: 20040127-5
install: release/ash/ash-20040127-5.tar.bz2 46 c616cffee0f344c37fd4e045a7a87054
source: release/ash/ash-20040127-5-src.tar.bz2 46 c616cffee0f344c37fd4e045a7a87054
[prev]
version: 20040127-4
install: release/ash/ash-20040127-4.tar.bz2 47178 26b04e64b710f4e9592258446920a992
source: release/ash/ash-20040127-4-src.tar.bz2 140516 7fa68e8ed663ac77b484079aab026ed8

Note that both the install and source tarballs are effectively empty - only 46 bytes.

When setup updates, it first removes the previous version, here ash-20040127-4.tar.bz2,
before trying to install the non-existent contents of ash-20040127-5.tar.bz2.  The
requires line then tells setup to install dash, the replacement of ash.

I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me that one other thing that "_obsolete"
does is to move the directory of the package in setup.exe's local package cache to be
a subdirectory of .../release/_obsolete/.

So the category _obsolete means "do not install this" and "you cannot use this
because it is not here", which is a bit stronger than "deprecated" and "avoid".

I hope that helps.  (I also hope that that was correct.  :-) )

- Barry
	Disclaimer:  Statements made herein are not made on behalf of NIAID.


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