Hello all, few months ago, in April and May, I have organized a community action to clean up broken links to AUR (and official) packages on the Arch wiki (see [0-2]). This has been done with a bot [3], which goes through all pages on Arch wiki with at least one package link and detects broken links. This is not very good strategy for multiple reasons: 1) It relies on one man to run the bot, process the log and create the appropriate wiki page. It is also very demanding task as one pass takes over four hours to execute and currently requires manual intervention about every 30 minutes. 2) It is safe to assume that only the newest broken links will be updated or removed. There are hundreds of broken links on unmaintained pages, usually in a language that no Archer speaks. These links clutter the list and make finding the recent broken links difficult. 3) Finding the information necessary to update the link (or the relevant section if necessary) is lengthy, sometimes impossible if the person is not directly involved in the software or its (re)moval in the repos. (Not all package deletions/merges/moves are "logged" in the ML, right?) There are solutions for 1 and 2 (improve the bot and make it run on a server, filter out ancient broken links), but 3 is the main reason. I would like to discuss a strategy that would take the issue more "from the source". The recently introduced "File Request" feature of the AUR backend should come in handy. Ideally, the wiki would be updated by the person responsible for the package's (re)moval (i.e. the person filing the request, if there is one), so I was thinking that something like "please update the wiki" (along with some useful information, e.g. link to wiki search query with the package's name) could be added to the file request form. Also some instructions could be put in the wiki and linked to. Next, it should be ensured that the information necessary for updating the link is searchable, even after longer time. The aur-requests ML is perfect for this, but there are actions not going through the file request feature (e.g. action on TU's initiative), right? Plus also the actions over official repos. I haven't given much thought to this yet, but there could be a public log of all actions in the AUR and (separately) official repositories. The information necessary are timestamp, pkgname, action type and reason (link to aur-requests if available). Any other ideas, comments, improvements? I haven't followed the development of AUR for the past two months, so I might have missed something... Regards, [0]: https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2014-April/035793.html [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Lahwaacz.bot/Report_2014-04-05 [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Lahwaacz.bot/Report_2014-05-11 [3]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wiki_Monkey -- jlk