On Fri 2008-05-02 12:08 , Eric Belanger wrote:
On Sat, 3 May 2008, Allan McRae wrote:
Luká Jirkovský wrote:
But in other way, packages without arch field are usually very, very old.
Then they probably fall in this category of the suggest removal guidelines - outdated and orphaned packages with few or no votes
This situation is behind my reasoning to create a list of potential removals first. I think we need to be careful of removing too many packages, especially in our first cleanup attempt. Just the really unneeded ones as a first step. I had even considered that once the list was made, then I would archive all the relevant PKGBUILDs before deleting them. But it would be better to just not delete useful packages in the first place...
I don't think it's a good idea to remove orphaned packages simply because they are out-of-date. Even out-of-date they can still be useful as it's better than having no PKGBUILD at all and maybe someone will adopt them eventually. That's the reason why we call it unsupported: the PKGBUILD can be out-of-date, unmaintained or not very good quality-wise. A lot of work has been invested in these PKGBUILD.
I totally agree with Eric here. I'm a bit worried about this "cleanup frenzy": there is a package in the AUR that is out-of-date and doesn't even compile. Why should we remove it? As Eric said, it's better than nothing. Unless the package is obsolete (e.g. gaim/pidgin) or it is a package already in the repos, IMHO there is no need to remove it. If a PKGBUILD contains errors, fix it, if you want to, but do not remove it. What about a "bug-fix day" instead of a "cleanup day" ? -- Alessio (molok) Bolognino Please send personal email to themolok@gmail.com Public Key http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xFE0270FB GPG Key ID = 1024D / FE0270FB 2007-04-11 Key Fingerprint = 9AF8 9011 F271 450D 59CF 2D7D 96C9 8F2A FE02 70FB