[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] [extra] repository cleanup

[Heiko Baums]

Am Sat, 13 Nov 2010 14:46:30 +0100
schrieb Andrea Scarpino <andrea at archlinux.org>:

> On Thursday 11 November 2010 22:54:36 Roman Kyrylych wrote:
> > I adopted some (and edited the page).
> Nice, today we have 291 orphans packages in [extra] (they were 352
> three days ago). 62 will be moved to [community]. 127 to AUR.
> 
> I didn't expect this success. I can start moving them today if you
> agree.

> <AUR>
> ding
> galculator
> gift
> gift-fasttrack
> gift-gnutella
> gift-openft
> gimp-fourier
> gtklp
> hexcurse
> httrack
> pan
> screem
> tcptraceroute

Nice, then I would need to install 110 packages from AUR and compile
them manually. When I switched to Arch Linux about 3 years ago it was
less than 50.

When will the so called "binary distribution" Arch Linux become a
second Gentoo, a pure source based distribution, because "no developer
is interested in maintaining" anything anymore? Btw., PKGBUILDs also in
AUR need to be maintained.

Really sad this progress and this massive and pointless cleanup.

Those packages are also quite common and important:

> eboard
> gdesklets
> lincity
> pure-ftpd
> tcsh
> tin

I guess there are some more in your list.

Also squashfs-utils which is "degraded" to community belongs to [extra]
because it is necessary for building LiveCDs as far as I know.

You really should reconsider this cleanup. You should consider that
such a distribution - and Arch Linux isn't a small and unimportant
distro anymore - is not only about some personal preferences of the
developers. Developers of such a binary distro should also maintain
packages which they are not using themselves.

And, btw., funny enough was ding updated recently although it was
orphaned.

I wouldn't say anything if you would cleanup the official repos from
unnecessary, unimportant and unused or hardly used packages like some
ttf fonts, GTK1 themes, etc. But there are too many, too important
packages in your list which definitely belong into the official binary
repos and which are in the official binary repos of every other binary
distribution.

Heiko