> On 22/03/2025 14:43, Robin Candau wrote:
>> On 3/22/25 11:50 AM, Antonio Rojas wrote:
>>> Time to clean up old cruft again. Please head to https://
>>> archlinux.org/devel/reports/unneeded-orphans/ and adopt packages you
>>> want to keep in the repos.
>>> [...]
>>> I will start dropping packages to AUR in ~ 10 days.
>>> [...]
>>> reflector
>>> [...]
>>
>> Re: Spring cleanup '25 [1]: Aside from being quite popular among our
>> users (probably for historical reasons and because it's currently the
>> only solution offered in the official repo as far as I can tell),
>> `reflector` is included and used in our ISO [2].
>> As such, it should *not* be dropped in the current state of things.
>>
> Actually I don't think that's a good reason to keep it. If anything it
> should be removed from ISO as well in my opinion.
>
> I don't think we should be including anything like that because then we
> should consider also anything from https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/
> Mirrors#Client-side_ranking
>
> So let's keep it simple.
   Removal from the ISO may be a reasonable choice. It’s not an
essential tool and, as an automatically started service, it was giving
people trouble.

   Personally I also believe benchmarking tools, that use others’
resources, shouldn’t be run without person’s explicit need. Privacy
concerns may be raised by some users too, given running the ISO
unconditionally contacts a large number of network services.

   But I don’t see a reason to remove reflector from the repos, unless
no new maintainer appears in due time.⁽¹⁾ The package is present on 58%
pkgstats-ed machines:⁽²⁾ more popular than chromium, zsh, or ruby. Upon
removal the only remaining options will be using Xyne’s repo or AUR. Not
a huge deal for seasoned Archers, but I don’t think fresh users should
be told to configure 3rd party repos or jump into AUR, if that’s not
really necessary.

Cheers, mpan

____
⁽¹⁾ Due time: when reflector’s PKGBUILD needs to be updated.
⁽²⁾ Webapp at <https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/packages/reflector>