On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 12:19:34PM +0000, Alad Wenter via aur-general wrote

On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 02:17:45AM +0000, Adam Fontenot via aur-general wrote:

...

Hi all,

The TU "alad" deleted my package, firefox-clean, from the AUR. I'm assuming this is a mistake, but I can't contact alad directly because their email is hidden on their profile. At first glance, it may appear that my version of the Firefox PKGBUILD in Extra does not do anything notable, but this is not the case. My package is intended to do three things:

It's not a mistake. Check the submission guidelines [1]; a package should only be submitted if it's not overly specialized and useful to more than 1 user. In this case, all but a few users will be able to achieve what this package offers by configuration of the regular firefox package in the repositories.

I disagree strongly. It is useful to multiple people: not only did the package already have feedback (a comment from a user), it was extremely popular when I posted about it on Reddit the day before you deleted it: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/72id6q/firefoxclean_a_firefox_bu... Furthermore, you have been deleting dozens of AUR packages in the last week since you became a TU. Respectfully, perhaps you should check to see if your expectations for AUR inclusion are quite as stringent as those of the other TUs?

If you had such concern about these "features" and wanted to disable them at compile time, there's existing packages which take this further e.g. firefox-esr-privacy. [2]

[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-esr-privacy/

Oddly enough, my AUR package does most of what this one does and more, but it has the extra advantage of tracking the latest version of Firefox instead of ESR.

A restart button is available through an addon. [3]

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/restart-my-fox

This will not be usable when Firefox 57 hits, because it (along with all other restart addons), isn't compatible with webextensions. I've been purging all XUL extensions from my browser, and that's why I wrote the patch as a replacement. If there's a consensus among TUs that packages like mine are not welcome on the AUR, I'm happy to back down and host the PKGBUILD on Github. Cheers, Adam