Warning users about dropped packages during upgrade

Hello,

it'd be nice if apk warned users if a package they've installed isn't available in the repositories anymore because it has been removed (e.g. moved to unmaintained, deleted because deprecated like py2-* things). Orphaned packages are bound to cause problems to the user at some point, e.g. when they can't upgrade their system anymore because of a soname bump in some library. We had some users having old long removed py2-* packages installed that needed libffi.so.6 but we only had libffi.so.7 available after an upgrade. As such users were unable to upgrade before they removed the unsupported package.

I have been thinking this recently, as it hit me too. And I agree some support would be needed for this. I am thinking the --available switch should probably remove from world the orphaned packages.

I don't think it's a good idea to just drop the packages from the world without explicit user approval. It'd be very unexpected for me if an application I use just gets removed out of the blue because the package maintainer maintaining it didn't want to maintain it anymore and moved it to unmaintained/. This probably is less of a problem for people not using edge, but if packages are just implicitly dropped during distro upgrades it's easy to miss that a package has been deleted.

--available already edits world and can result in losing a specifically requested version. It would make sense to me. But I understand adding new feature like that can be unexpected. Users why want to approve change should anyway use --interactive mode or make it default behavior via the file config.

Okay, that makes sense, thanks for explaining it. I still think --available becomes a bit dangerous with that and personally I'd prefer another switch for that, but I understand if you don't want to make every little thing configurable.

I guess it'd work like this then:

• Without any flags: apk only prints a warning about orphaned packages
• With --available: apk purges orphaned packages itself
• With --interactive: apk prompts to purge orphaned packages

Yes, that would make sense to me. Maybe --available should also be more explicit on which dependencies it will reset. I suppose making the purging of orphaned packages could be a separate switch too. Though, then I suspect we would need to add a mechanism to handle default options from etc/apk/config and perhaps environment APK_OPTIONS too.

mentioned in issue aports#11605 (closed)

changed milestone to %v3.1

upgrade --prune exists to prune these now. I suppose the last piece missing is to have upgrade give warning and recommend using --prune and/or --available if needed.

closed with commit 7b0b69a3