Hi,
TL;DR: the notification emails when AUR packages are adopted by TUs are
indistinguishable from deletions, and communications norms around them
makes it hard to discover otherwise. Please change either or both.

I recently was notified that three packages I was monitoring had been
deleted from AUR, with no further detail beyond eg
> grawlinson [1] deleted python-markdownify [2].
>
> You will no longer receive notifications about this package.
>
> [1] https://aur.archlinux.org/account/grawlinson/
> [2] https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/python-markdownify/
Concerned, I checked whether I was still using them, and indeed I was --
python-markdownify is an optdepend of papis.
I was just about to contact the previous maintainer about the abrupt
deletion (instead of disownment) -- I'd checked the ML archives and
couldn't find any mention of such plans -- when I realised grawlinson is
actually a TU.
On a hunch, since this isn't the first time this has happened, I checked
> $ pacman -Si python-markdownify
> Repository      : extra
> Name            : python-markdownify
> Version         : 1.2.2-2
> Description     : Convert HTML to Markdown
> Architecture    : any
> URL             : https://github.com/matthewwithanm/python-markdownify
> Licenses        : MIT
> Groups          : None
> Provides        : None
> Depends On      : python  python-beautifulsoup4
> Optional Deps   : None
> Conflicts With  : None
> Replaces        : None
> Download Size   : 30.74 KiB
> Installed Size  : 128.32 KiB
> Packager        : George Rawlinson <[email protected]>
> Build Date      : Thu 15 Jan 2026 03:48:32
> Validated By    : SHA-256 Sum  Signature

Of course, once the package updates and pacman notices a newer version
exists in extra, it *will* notify me of that. However, in the absence of
that, I needed to luck into guessing what had happened.
Instead, the following three possibilities suggest themselves to avoid
this situation again:
- Have moving from AUR to repos be a change warranting a pkgrel bump.
- Change TU adoption policy to require a form announcment to aur-general.
- Have TU adoption trigger a distinct automated email from aurweb to
  listeners.
Any or all of these would've been enough to save me the detective work.
Thanks,
Gesh

Reply via email to