On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 11:16 PM, Lukas Fleischer <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi, > > There seems to be quite some confusion about the package migration > process and about package deletion. I would like to clarify my point of > view. Hopefully it serves as a basis for discussion (i.e. technical > discussion without attacking anybody personally). > > As already mentioned a couple of times, cleaning up the AUR was one of > the incentives for having users resubmit their packages. This has > several advantages: > > * Working packages: New users are confused when an AUR package does not > build. However, packages are often broken because of being outdated or > unmaintained. > > * Less clutter: Working packages are easier to find. Package statistics > are not distorted. > > * Storage: Less space used for packages that do not work. On the AUR > server and on mirrors. > > So please do not upload packages any packages to AUR 4.0.0, unless you > are interested in maintaining them. If a package has not been > resubmitted to the AUR 4.0.0, the maintainer did not care about it for > at least two months. Please either decide to maintain such a package or > wait for somebody else willing to do so. > > Along these lines, it might also make sense to generally delete packages > that have been unmaintained for a long time. Maybe have a script to > automatically remove packages that have been orphaned for a couple of > months. Note that we do keep the Git repositories of deleted packages, > so if anybody wants to maintain the package later, he can always clone > the repository of the deleted package, fix the package and simply push > it afterwards. We are also working on a command to revive deleted > packages without having to add a new commit. Package deletion is > equivalent to "hiding it from the website", it does not mean that the > package and all its Git history are gone. Orphaning a package is a > preliminary stage that only tags a package without hiding it. > > The "missing dependency" argument was brought up a couple of times. If > you discover such a case, please contact the maintainer of the package > that requires the missing package and ask him to submit it as well. You > should only maintain an AUR package if you are using it, so everybody > should be interested in maintaining dependencies of their packages as > well (unless they are maintained by somebody else already, of course). > > Regards, > Lukas > Thanks for clarifying your point of view Lukas. I think some AUR maintainers are out-of-the-loop on the migration issues, for one reason or another. I suspect some simply weren't subscribed to this list over the last few months.
