[arch-general] Out dated packages in extra - What to do ?

[Mathieu Clabaut]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Jan de Groot <jan at jgc.homeip.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 11:12 +0200, Mathieu Clabaut wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> >  what is the policy for extra out-of-date packages.
> >  I'm thinking about eclipse and antlr....
> >  The first one gave birth to its AUR up to date counterpart :
> > eclipse-bin,
> >  and I've got an antlr3 package at hand, but I do not want to make it
> > in AUR without knowing if it is good practice.
> >
> >  Those package are flagged as out-of-date.
> >  The bts policy is to not open bug for such a request, so as a last
> > resort, I send this mail...
> >
> >  There was already some discussion about this problem in the end of
> > 2007; see http://readlist.com/lists/archlinux.org/arch/1/6979.html
> >
> >  Thank you for any tip.
> >
> >  PS. I've seen at least one user leaving arch because of such
> > out-dated packages.... (In french :
> > http://linuxfr.org/~chicha/26802.html<http://linuxfr.org/%7Echicha/26802.html>
> )
>
> As for antlr3: yes, I know it's outdated. The reason why we keep it at
> 2.x is that 2.x works fine for the packages in our repository that
> depend on it, and that I haven't had a chance to make a good build for
> antlr3 from source (it simply won't build).
> You can place antlr3 in AUR if you like, as long as it is backwards
> compatible with antlr from extra, it may provide the package, otherwise
> you should make sure it's not conflicting.


Ok, thank you for the tip . I'll do that, and will be careful to not braking
the compatibility.

Anyway, in the long term, it would be very nice to be able to publish
somewhere the reason for some package being out dated.... It may allow
anonymous user  to provide some help.
For now,  I've still no clue for eclipse.... I use eclipse-bin from AUR, but
it is not very satisfying (not backward compatible w.r.t other
eclipse-plugin package relying on eclipse being install somewhere).

Anyway, thank you very much for Arch, and keep the good work ;-)

-mathieu
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