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>