alad via aur-general wrote:
When I look at the removed package however, I see a bash script which takes up all available resources to display an animation which may induce severe health issues to some users, i.e. induce epileptic attacks.
I somehow doubt that epilepsy was at any point a consideration in the deletion :P
When the package furthermore has no other defined purpose - as Morten pointed out, this is clearly something overly specialized - *and* the deletion was handled according to procedure (with a deletion request, see below), then I don't see the issue.
The deletion request itself gives an invalid reason: it was not "supersed"(ed) by the unrelated package in community. Also, just following the procedure (report, delete) doesn't make any difference to the validity of the deletion. Reports are just for regular users to bring the package to the attention of a TU. The issue is that there are plenty of packages in the AUR that most people would never find useful, but that's never been a criterion for deletion in itself. The issue here is that seemingly arbitrary discretion was applied without any real reasoning given.
On the deletion request: it can be seen at [1]. It likely should have been accepted by a different TU than the requester, as well as given more time than 11 minutes before acception. Now if this were some systemic issue, rather than the occasional mistake any of us might make, then I could see why we'd have this discussion. In my experience, it is the occasional mistake.
I agree that it was likely just an inattentive mistake while working through the requests. Nevertheless, it led to a user bringing it up on the forum so I felt it necessary to address it here. It really isn't a big deal, but it would be better to avoid repeating in the future if possible. As the number of TUs continues to grow, we have to make sure that we agree on how policy is meant to be implemented, otherwise it's very unfair to some users.
[1] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-requests/2019-February/029689.html
Alad