Dear MarsSeed,

as the current maintainer of the gnuplot4 package, I would like to thank you
for bringing these issues to my attention.

I will try to address each point, reporting the excerpts from your email in
bold:

> Dependency chain (of wxgtk2.8) is broken.

Could you please elaborate more on what you mean with "broken"? I just tried
to compile the wxgtk2.8 package and I was able to build a package in a clean
chroot.

If you encountered a build issue, I invite you to report it in the comments
section for the wxgtk2.8 package, and I will try to address it as soon as
possible.

> The latest version of this utility software is available in Arch/extra
> repo, and provides more features, not less.

Unfortunately, the latest version of gnuplot (v6.0.1) is not fully backward
compatible with gnuplot v4 (among other changes, the default colors differ).
Having an AUR package for a legacy version of a software can be crucial for
reproducing old plots.

Additionally (and please do correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not an expert), the
sole fact that a package is outdated does not imply that it should not
be available in AUR.
Consider for example the "gcc43" package. The latest GCC version is indeed
available in the official repositories, and they offer more features, but
there is still value in providing the legacy version.

> Also AUR has GUI-less variants, for interactive CLI usage
> (AUR/gnuplot-nogui) as well as headless (scripted) usage (AUR/gnuplot-
> headless).

Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of the mentioned packages provides a
fully backward-compatible way of re-generating old plots.

I thank you again for raising the above points, and I completely understand
the need to balance the maintenance burden between new and old software.
If the final decision of the AUR maintainers is to delete the package, I
will surely comply. The only reason I submitted the package is because I
hoped others could share my work and take advantage of it.

With my best regards,
Francesco


From: notify@aur.archlinux.org
Subject: [PRQ#62896] Deletion Request for gnuplot4
Date: Wednesday, August 28, 2024 at 13:41 UTC+2
To: aur-requests@lists.archlinux.org
Cc: frazar0@hotmail.it, marcell.meszaros@runbox.eu

MarsSeed [1] filed a deletion request for gnuplot4 [2]:

Dependency chain (of wxgtk2.8) is broken.
The latest version of this utility software is available in Arch/extra
repo, and provides more features, not less.

Also AUR has GUI-less variants, for interactive CLI usage
(AUR/gnuplot-nogui) as well as headless (scripted) usage (AUR/gnuplot-
headless).

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/account/MarsSeed/
[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/gnuplot4/