[arch-dev-public] [IDEA] no packages older than one year in repos

[Allan McRae]

Hi,

This is an idea I have been thinking about for a while.  One 
disadvantage of rolling release (at least with how we implement it), is 
that some packages do not get rebuilt in a long time.  That can mean 
policy changes never get fully implemented (e.g. removal of .FILELIST 
from packages, moving man pages to /usr/share/man, LDFLAGS changes, 
arch=any, etc).  Also, new toolchains bring new optimizations that are 
good to have.

I would like to propose that we ensure no package in the repos goes 
unbuilt for more than a year.  Looking at the current state of the 
repos, this should not be too much of a hassle once we catch up.  There 
are about 12 packages in [core] and 120 packages in [extra] that 
currently have not been rebuild for more than a year.  So, that 
indicates new packages to be rebuilt would occur at a rate of about two 
a week.

If people like this idea, I can add the packages to the unimportant 
rebuild list wiki page 
(http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:Unimportant_Rebuild_List) 
and gradually start doing to rebuilds.  Once caught up, we can add a 
check to the integrity check script to catch new builds.

Allan