[arch-general] Uninstallable Packages

[Jeremiah Dodds]

Sorry if this is dragging up an old topic, but I've been poking around
AIF as I'm interested in possibly (hopefully) bringing it up to speed
and/or improving it, and I noticed that it's still in the repos, but
isn't installable by anyone who doesn't happen to have grub legacy still
installed on their system, unless I'm missing something.

It seems like we'd want to avoid having to manually remove packages
every time it becomes impossible to install a set of them. This might be
my unfamiliarity with libalpm or pacman or any other myriad part of the
stack, but it seems like the type of thing that could be handled by a
utlity and a cron job fairly easily.

It also seems like the type of thing that wouldn't be too annoying to
deal with manually at the moment, but that could get frustrating for
both users and devs down the line. Menial maintanence tasks like that[1]
tend to end up sucking down a lot of people's time and energy in the
long run, in my experience.

If the lack of an automated "dead package remover" is just a "lack of
time / patches welcome" type of thing, I'd volunteer to take a crack at
writing the thing. If it isn't, I'd really like to know why.

Footnotes: 
[1]  unless, of course, it's not actually a menial task, in which case
     please enlighten me

-- 
Jeremiah Dodds

github: https://github.com/jdodds
irc   : exhortatory