The FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), responsible for the technical part of the development of Fedora Linux, has decided to remove packages from the distribution repositories related to the Deepin desktop environment due to maintenance issues. The team responsible for the formation of Fedora releases is instructed not to restore these packages, if a request is received from the deepinde-sig group, without re-checking them.
The reason for deletion was the lack of activity in the deepinde-sig maintainer group and the abandoned nature of packages that remain for a long time without fixing serious errors and presumably have unfixed vulnerabilities. Some of the uncorrected bugs resulted in build from source (FTBFS) issues or installation failures (FTI).
A month ago, FESCo members made the decision to delay the removal of packages and attempted to contact the maintainers of the Deepin packages to clarify the status of the project. The developers managed to contact the main maintainer, who explained that he was not against the removal of packages from the repository. This was due to the fact that all members of the deepinde-sig group were too busy with their main work and did not have time to continue maintaining packages with Deepin for Fedora. Attempts to attract new maintainers were unsuccessful.
About a year ago, Deepin packages were removed from the openSUSE repositories. This was a result of the Deepin maintainer attempting to bypass openSUSE’s package review rules. Without notifying the security team, the maintainer posted a package called “deepin-feature-enable” in the repository. This package installed additional features that were not tested and contained unfixed security problems. If the user confirmed the operation, additional D-Bus configuration files and Polkit policies were unpacked into the system directories, bypassing standard installation mechanisms. While such manipulations were not performed in the Fedora packages, there were no mandatory security reviews of D-Bus services and Polkit policies. Some Deep