On 02/08/13 02:02, Karol Blazewicz wrote:
Intro: Below are some questions / ideas I came up with. I simply don't know if anyone cares about these issues, whether there are rules or at least suggestions how to best deal with them or is it up to the maintainer.
I've heard there were some plans wrt a build server that would periodically check if packages still build. Any news?
I see I have just received word that a proof-of-concept for the idea is available. So there is some progress.
If there indeed are issues that need fixing, should I file the low-priority bugs now? Summer vacation may not be the best time for Arch-related work so maybe I should wait until September so that people are back from holidays?
I'm fairly sure summer holidays are in the end of December/start of January, so that should not be an issue! :D
Upstream urls: I found that dozens of packages in the repos have an upstream url that prints 'Page Not Found' in one way or another. Should I open bug reports for these packages or does nobody care about it? I could also check if the source is still available. If opening bug reports is OK, should I limit creating the reports to e.g. 10 a day? If I find a url that works, I will include it as a suggestion for the maintainer.
If there are bugs, open bugs. The bug tracker is for tracking bugs... It does not matter how many are opened. Even better if you provide a solution in the bug. We can close bugs far quicker than you can create them, so that will never be a real issue.
For example for https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/autocutsel/ neither the url nor the source is available, but I found what seems like a perfectly good autocutsel website: http://www.nongnu.org/autocutsel/ with a link to the source.
File a bug.
Some projects seem to be gone for good e.g. https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/apricots/ even grabs the sources from ftp.archlinux.org https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/plain/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=... Would http://freecode.com/projects/apricots be a better website? It has some info e.g. that last development is from a decade ago, a screenshot, a longer description ...
I'd say such packages should just be dropped altogether.
What about urls that point to a redirect? Is it OK only if the redirect is automatic and otherwise upstream urls should be updated if they moved e.g. from SourceForge to GoogleCode? An example: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/junit/ has http://junit.sourceforge.net/ as the upstream url, but when you go there, it says 'Please see our main site at junit.org'.
Even an automatic redirect might not be permanent, so I think these should be changed.
Is there a rule that 'www' should be omitted or that it should be included? https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/alsa-lib/ : http://www.alsa-project.org https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/alsa-firmware/ : http://alsa-project.org/
If both are correct, it does not matter. About here I got bored...