[arch-general] How to track packages dropped from the repos?

[Karol Blazewicz]

On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 9:33 PM, Maximilian Bräutigam <m at xbra.de> wrote:
> Am 19.04.2014 12:39, schrieb Lorenzo Bandieri:
>
>> Hi list,
>>
>> Sometimes packages are silently dropped from the repos. This happened
>> for example in the last few days with mash 0.2.0-3, which apparently I
>> installed as a dependency for gnome (I guess it is no longer
>> required). I follow arch-general, arch-dev-public and aur-general, and
>> as far as I know, this change wasn't announced in any of these lists.
>> I recall other examples in the last 2-3 years (this is roughly the
>> time I've used arch consistently), but now I don't remember the
>> packages involved.
>>
>> Currently I try to keep track of these changes by running e.g. "pacman
>> -Qm" and "pacman -Qdt" once in a while, so it's no big deal. However,
>> I think it would be interesting to know from a more "official" channel
>> when a package is dropped and why. This would allow users to be aware
>> of the change and decide whether the package is still needed (and act
>> accordingly, e.g. if the package is dropped to AUR, one could
>> subscribe to comments or check for updates) or can be safely
>> uninstalled.
>>
>> I searched without finding anything decisive (e.g. these threads [1]
>> [2] suggest possible workarounds in the form of scripts). I wonder if
>> better methods to track dropped packages exist; if not, would it be
>> feasible to implement a solution, e.g. a list where dropped packages
>> are announced, similar to "last rites" in gentoo?
>>
>> Thanks for your time,
>>
>> Lorenzo
>>
>> [1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147574
>> [2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=125665
>>
>
>
> Hi Lorenzo,
>
> I am using yaourt to track packages from aur (and possibly packages moved
> from official repos to aur). Note, that it is not an official peace of
> software and you should read the wiki carefully. [1]
>
> Best wishes,
> Max
>
> [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Yaourt

List the packages that are in the repos and compare these lists to see
what new packages are in the repos and which ones have been dropped.
You can use expac to format the list the way you like it and run it
daily / weekly.
If you're using testing repos you should make sure you won't get
flooded by the list of new packages twice - when they enter testing
and when they're moved to non-testing repos. Packages "disappearing"
from testing repos would be false positives when looking for the ones
that have been removed completely. I think the easiest way would be to
drop the repo name and keep just the package name, unless you care if
the package is moved between repos e.g. from extra to community.