On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 6:26 PM, 王凯 fearee@gmail.com wrote:

You can just ping the pkg maintainer. Why make things complex.

2008/4/12, gan lu rhythm.gan@gmail.com:

...

In my opinion, Arch is the best distro can really do bleeding edge with stablility, thank devs for their excellent work. However due to some reasion (saying shortage of time, man power, instersts etc), some applications can't be updated in time. We can certainly flag it out of date in the web page easily, but is there a way we can record when it was flaged at the first time and count how many people (useres) want to flag it (like enable people to vote, but of course only send a remind email at the first/person )? Just my idea, I am not a programmer so don't blame me not to do it real by myself.

To make him/her crazy? I prefer to compile them myself if I would ping the

package maintainer, the email should have done the thing if that works.

On Samstag, 12. April 2008 17:33 Jan de Groot wrote:

At first i don't want to create a bureaucratic monster.-)

The first thing I stated isn't actually true though: we can unflag packages, which we'll certainly do when people think development versions of packages like GTK are newer than the stable version in our repository. This happens on a daily basis when GNOME development releases are pushed to the FTP for example, or in cases when people think gnome-common should be 2.22.0 because GNOME is at 2.22.x (while there's only gnome-common-2.20.0 on the upstream FTP).

I never think about it but as i wrote your lines i think about a comment filed as in the bug tracker. So a dev can unflag the package with a comment as "It is the actual one" or "Will get updated if package xyz from testing is ready" or "The newer one don't compiles because ...". In the third case it is possible that more people can search for a patch or can contact the dev from mainstream and the maintainer of the package don't need to tell the same even and even again.

But if this makes more work than it is a help than forget my idea.

See you, Attila

On Sonntag, 13. April 2008 01:13 gan lu wrote:

Yes, the thing bothers me is that you see how many times a package has being flaged for quite a long time, but without any feedback from maintainer or devs, which is sad for you.

Yes, i don't like this feeling of knowing nothing too but on the other side i can understand that a maintainer don't want to say that he/she have no time to do this or to say even the same as at example that mainstream is broken for reason xyz.

So i expand my idea to this layout with two standard answers and one field for explanation. Example:

This package has been flagged out-of-date [ ] I have no time at the moment [ ] It depends on a package which is in testing [X] Other reason: "The mainstream is broken because it don't compiles with gcc 4.3"

I think this could have positive side effects:

- User who see that time is the problem make it by themselves if they need this update in this moment.

- More users could decide to use testing for this case which could be better too.

- More people than only the maintainer search (or create) a patch or contact the authors of the mainstream.

But still again this is only a idea for an half-automatic interface of the communication and not a wish for more officialism for the devs.

See you, Attila