On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Emmanuel Benisty wrote:

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 4:12 PM, Mathieu Clabaut wrote:

...

what is the policy for extra out-of-date packages. I'm thinking about eclipse and antlr.... The first one gave birth to its AUR up to date counterpart : eclipse-bin, and I've got an antlr3 package at hand, but I do not want to make it in AUR without knowing if it is good practice.

Those package are flagged as out-of-date. The bts policy is to not open bug for such a request, so as a last resort, I send this mail...

There was already some discussion about this problem in the end of 2007; see http://readlist.com/lists/archlinux.org/arch/1/6979.html

Thank you for any tip.

PS. I've seen at least one user leaving arch because of such out-dated packages.... (In french : http://linuxfr.org/~chicha/26802.htmlhttp://linuxfr.org/%7Echicha/26802.html )

-mathieu

please check http://archlinux.org/news/397/

Do you mean that those package are orphan ? If so, how can we know the oprhaness status of an extra package ? How can we know if the package is out of date due to some technical problems (but that someone is actively working on it), or if it is out of date and nobody cares about it.... I'd dare to take care of some packages (antlr for example), but I do not fill at least the "Enough free time" requirement of the news 397. And finally, would it be a good thing for me to create an antlr3 packages (a bit like the eclipse-bin package with respect to the eclipse extra package) ? -mathieu

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Jan de Groot wrote:

On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 11:12 +0200, Mathieu Clabaut wrote:

...

Hello,

what is the policy for extra out-of-date packages. I'm thinking about eclipse and antlr.... The first one gave birth to its AUR up to date counterpart : eclipse-bin, and I've got an antlr3 package at hand, but I do not want to make it in AUR without knowing if it is good practice.

Those package are flagged as out-of-date. The bts policy is to not open bug for such a request, so as a last resort, I send this mail...

There was already some discussion about this problem in the end of 2007; see http://readlist.com/lists/archlinux.org/arch/1/6979.html

Thank you for any tip.

PS. I've seen at least one user leaving arch because of such out-dated packages.... (In french : http://linuxfr.org/~chicha/26802.htmlhttp://linuxfr.org/%7Echicha/26802.html

)

As for antlr3: yes, I know it's outdated. The reason why we keep it at 2.x is that 2.x works fine for the packages in our repository that depend on it, and that I haven't had a chance to make a good build for antlr3 from source (it simply won't build). You can place antlr3 in AUR if you like, as long as it is backwards compatible with antlr from extra, it may provide the package, otherwise you should make sure it's not conflicting.

Ok, thank you for the tip . I'll do that, and will be careful to not braking the compatibility. Anyway, in the long term, it would be very nice to be able to publish somewhere the reason for some package being out dated.... It may allow anonymous user to provide some help. For now, I've still no clue for eclipse.... I use eclipse-bin from AUR, but it is not very satisfying (not backward compatible w.r.t other eclipse-plugin package relying on eclipse being install somewhere). Anyway, thank you very much for Arch, and keep the good work ;-) -mathieu

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 12:04:24PM +0200, Mathieu Clabaut wrote: [...]

...

Anyway, in the long term, it would be very nice to be able to publish somewhere the reason for some package being out dated.... It may allow anonymous user to provide some help.

I'm thinking the bug tracker would be a decent place to record reasons that a package is out dated. Then people could easily bump the ticket with new comments and suggestions, and everyone watching the bug would receive notifications.

Looks good to me, but for any reason, it is explicitly out of the BTS

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 3:53 PM, Loui wrote: policy now, which states that it should not be use to report out dated packages... Does Anybody know the rationale for this policy ? -mathieu

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 10:27:36AM -0400, Christian Babeux wrote:

Loui wrote:

...

I'm thinking the bug tracker would be a decent place to record reasons that a package is out dated. Then people could easily bump the ticket with new comments and suggestions, and everyone watching the bug would receive notifications.

Normally the bug tracker should be used for bugs tracking. An outdated package is not a "bug". But, we still need a way to communicate why a certain package is outdated.

No it's not a bug, but it could be considered a feature request.