On Wed, 12 Aug 2015 11:05:08 +0200 Lukas Fleischer <lfleischer@archlinux.org> wrote:
I consider this a slight abuse of the orphan/disown functionality. Wikipedia defines orphan as
[...] a child whose parents are dead or have abandoned them permanently.
In my opinion, orphan packages should be defined analogously: Packages which have been abandoned permanently by their former maintainers. I didn't know that some people used package disowning the way you described it. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
If you want to keep to your orphan analogy, think of this more as being a foster parent or running a orphanage.
Even if we disregard the etymology of the word, I still do not think that "disown but keep maintaining" is a good idea. It makes it quite hard to distinguish between "real" orphans and "maintained" orphans. Also, the maintainer information is the first point of contact when issues with the package arise. Hiding it like that doesn't seem like a good idea. So maybe we need to improve the way changing maintainership works. Having a "Give up for adoption" button (that keeps the current maintainer while allowing anybody to adopt the package) in addition to "Disown" is one possibility. I am open to other suggestions.
This could work, but only if AUR helpers support it. I would image this is a very common mechanism for people to find out that a package they use is an orphan and adopt it.
Maybe you could at least add yourself as a co-maintainer for now. Or if you are really *actively* trying to find new maintainers, it probably wouldn't hurt if you were listed as a maintainer until you find somebody.
Many of the packages I orphaned while searching for a maintainer were picked up by someone I never had contact with. I have only been successful in my active search in a few cases, even though I had a couple of people express interest in picking them up before I orphaned them :(. As others have said, orphaning is currently the best way to find a new maintainer.
By the way: Yes, "orphan" packages in the official repositories are deleted from time to time. We have so-called Midyear Cleanups and Christmas Cleanup where exactly that is done (although I think we didn't have them for a while for some reason)...
Sure it does happen, but they are not deleted after a few weeks as a matter of course. My point is simply that assuming an orphan is broken and useless is premature, same as orphans in the binary repos. Doug