On Sun, 17 Aug 2014 at 08:47:40, carstene1ns wrote:
While the new AUR request functionality is a good thing and widely accepted (over 500 requests yet), it also brings us some problems:
(1)inhibition threshold - It is much easier to remove a package now. (2)response time - Requests get accepted before the package maintainer or others have time to explain or react.
There may be other problems, but these two bugged me since it was implemented.
## For the tl;dr version, please skip the following remarks. ## [...] tl;dr:
What can we do to make things better? Should we (re)write the policy for TUs about accepting AUR requests? They should at least investigate. I think a good start would be to have users provide real reasons for deleting a package and trying to fix them otherwise (themselves or with help from the maintainer).
Policies are important but I think it is at least as important to have a user interface that makes it easy (natural) to comply with them. Let me give an example for that: When the package request interface was introduced, all orphan requests were accepted before the expiration of the grace period, even though our package request guidelines were still the same. Why? The new user interface makes it much easier to go through the list and accept requests, while checking whether the request is older than two weeks was just as "hard" as it had been before. In a minor release, I added a feature that locks new orphan requests for 14 days and now, accepting a locked request is much more work than accepting an unlocked request (requires 4 clicks instead of 1 click). It looks like that worked out pretty well. What I suggest is to introduce such a locking mechanism for deletion requests as well. One might argue that deletion requests are often uncontroversial (upstream has been dead for >3 years, sources are gone, there is no fork) but then again, it doesn't really matter whether the broken package stays in the AUR for another 14 days. It might be a good idea to skip (or shorten) the grace period if the request is filed by the current package maintainer, though. Another point is that a lot of Trusted Users unfortunately don't seem to follow the aur-requests mailing list. And the package request interface is not linked to the mailing list in any way. So, while it is technically more difficult than the simple locking idea, it may also be desirable to have the AUR check the mailing list (or the mailing list archives) and mark a request if there is any discussion, preferably with a link to the archives.
best regards, carstene1ns