Requests and the etiquette involved
Good evening, what happened to the general etiquette in trying to contact someone before submitting requests? It's all nice and fair if someone wants to help clean up the AUR. And it's also the case that one of my (now ex-)packages is a candidate for deletion/merging, if the replacement is able to replace it. If being the keyword. I wanted to do that when the new package is able to replace the old and therefore I was still the maintainer. And to my surprise someone filed recently a merge request. Not that I was contacted before that someone took action. Didn't say a thing, because, as I said, this request has a point and wasn't sure if arguing to keep it is worth the hassle. But today came the next surprise. An orphan request with the words "Orphaning to facilitate quicker merging to papermerge-core.". Which got granted and subsequently taken by the new "maintainer". Again without trying to contact me beforehand. And that was the final straw. It left me speechless and upset. I get now why this was automatically accepted albeit being an active participant on the AUR. Again.. The PKGBUILD in question is on balance time. What matters to me more and what I am upset about is the behaviour in question. Before I make a request and the package has still an owner I try to contact them or at least make sure they are inactive. But that isn't important anymore? This is at least the third time were a PKGBUILD, where of the time being I was the active maintainer, got some request which was granted without an effort in communicating before. This felt really disrespectful. There is time and effort involved in helping actively on the aurweb and then someone comes through, not caring that there is an active maintainer who might have to say something on the topic and does whatever someone thinks. What the hell? This is, at least as far as I know, not how a community works. But maybe I'm wrong. Whatever. This is of my chest now. tl;dr: I wish, all people that go through packages to achieve a cleaner aurweb, would pay attention to the maintainer field on the aurweb and act accordingly. Best regards
On Mon, 20 Nov 2023 18:06:35 +0100 Lex Black <autumn-wind@web.de> wrote:
But today came the next surprise. An orphan request with the words "Orphaning to facilitate quicker merging to papermerge-core.". Which got granted and subsequently taken by the new "maintainer". Again without trying to contact me beforehand.
It appears that it was auto-accepted, which would mean that it had been marked out-of-date for more than 180 days. This is the threshold that the AUR maintainers have set to consider it abandoned. Leaving it out of date for that long, this shouldn't have been such a surprise.
Am 20. November 2023 18:53:41 MEZ schrieb Doug Newgard <dnewgard@outlook.com>:
On Mon, 20 Nov 2023 18:06:35 +0100 Lex Black <autumn-wind@web.de> wrote:
But today came the next surprise. An orphan request with the words "Orphaning to facilitate quicker merging to papermerge-core.". Which got granted and subsequently taken by the new "maintainer". Again without trying to contact me beforehand.
It appears that it was auto-accepted, which would mean that it had been marked out-of-date for more than 180 days. This is the threshold that the AUR maintainers have set to consider it abandoned. Leaving it out of date for that long, this shouldn't have been such a surprise.
Granted, I didn't know about the 180 days before. Was under the assumption that it is still bound to the account activity. If it ever was. Nevertheless I was more surprised about the action itself happening despite the statements in the wiki to seek contact first.
Looking at https://web.archive.org/web/20231017082509/https://aur.archlinux.org/package..., it appears this has been marked out of date since 2021-04-19. TrialnError was accepted as maintainer on the condition that they could get v2 working, which they only did by starting work on the mentioned papermerge-core package. While it shouldn't matter at all, the orphan request still seems quite pointless when a merge request already exists. I've CC'd MarsSeed. On 2023/11/20 12:53, Doug Newgard wrote:
On Mon, 20 Nov 2023 18:06:35 +0100 Lex Black <autumn-wind@web.de> wrote:
But today came the next surprise. An orphan request with the words "Orphaning to facilitate quicker merging to papermerge-core.". Which got granted and subsequently taken by the new "maintainer". Again without trying to contact me beforehand. It appears that it was auto-accepted, which would mean that it had been marked out-of-date for more than 180 days. This is the threshold that the AUR maintainers have set to consider it abandoned. Leaving it out of date for that long, this shouldn't have been such a surprise.
-- Cheers, Aᴀʀᴏɴ
Hey, I fully agree with that statement. The automated checks can only go so far. Of course there are cases where the package has been out of date for longer, however even in such cases the packager might have forgotten to update the package after he got the request or there was an issue on their side. E.g. on case I did an update but forgot to push it. I also noticed that more users use out-of-date flags as a way to bug the maintainer of a package for attention. I had a package teams-for-linux-wbunbled-electron that was simply deleted/merged after such a request because the author of the request didn't understood what w as in without means. I would favor that before a request is send the user should try to send a comment or request simply shouldn't be automatically accepted before the user has time to reply e.g. after at least a week to reply. Sometimes it feels like users except that there is an update at day 1. Br, Björn
participants (4)
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Aaron Liu
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Björn Bidar
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Doug Newgard
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Lex Black