Did you ever wonder whether the packages you have installed are still maintained or will be available when you update to the next release? I might have a solution to answer this question for you. Recently I wrote a little script that reports packages that are orphaned, retired or missing from your current Fedora/EPEL release or any newer release. It is still only in a proof-of-concept status, but I hope to get it into Fedora eventually together with a useful cron job (or systemd timer) to get regular status reports.
If you would like to know why there might be a difference between missing and retired packages, I have the answer for you. This is quite common for EPEL packages. Even if a package is available in for example EPEL 6, it still needs active action by a maintainer to branch it for EPEL 7. Therefore packages in EPEL 7 might currently be missing and still become available. I, for example, hope that ipython will get into EPEL 7, but I read on IRC that some RHEL 7 package is not recent enought for a recent ipython release. Therefore it might take a while. Also for Fedora packages it might happen that a package is retired before the next release is branched (which is currently Fedora 21), therefore a package might be reported missing for Fedora 21 and retired for Rawhide/Fedora 22.
Keep in mind hat in about seven weeks a lot of currently orphaned packages will be removed from the EPEL repositories, if nobody shows up to maintain them. My script will help you identify packages, you might be missing, therefore it is now a good idea to join the Fedora package maintainers and adopt orphaned packages that are important to you.
blogtilludrop 