Managed Package: How to get rid of dependency from Territory Management feature

Question

SF is going to drop Territory Management (aka TM 1.0) in Summer 2020.

So we are trying to migrate our managed package to Enterprise Territory Management (aka TM 2.0).

As the first step of such migration, we are building some abstraction layer at Apex code level to work with territories, hiding all the hard references to Territory object (e.g. using dynamic soql, sobject get/put methods etc.)

After wrapping all hard references into abstraction layer, we were able to deploy our code base successfully to sandbox without any TM enabled, as a proof that all dependencies are really hidden, i.e. no static dependencies.

But when it comes to our managed package, hitting upload button still leads us to the screen where Territory Management is ticked in Package Requirements section, claiming that this is sort of 'auto-detected' dependencies.

Question here: how to make managed package let this dependency go? From our perspective, it seems like there is nothing pointing to territory explicitly in our repository. Is there any way to detect why it's still considered TM as a dependency when uploading managed package? Any idea would be appreciated.

Answer 1

As it's been stated before, you need to engage Partner Support. Once a managed package has a dependency on a feature, and a version with that dependency is uploaded, it cannot be removed by the ISV. This restriction is in place to allow for upgrades.

Answer 2

Finally we've figured it out.

All our code base in repository has already been cleaned up from territory dependencies. But at the same time there was some garbage left right on packaging org itself (some obsolete test classes etc.) probably someone forgot to add sf artifacts to destructive changes xml when removing them from repo.

After retrieving package from packaging org itself and comparing with snapshot in repository, we were able to identify and remove those obsolete artifacts. And this was enough, i.e. on next package upload TM feature was not ticked anymore as an auto-detected dependency.

So there is no need to involve SF support here. After cleaning up all explicit Territory dependencies, package really let it go by itself, even despite having previously released major versions currently installed on many clients orgs.