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

[Lorenzo Bandieri]

2014-04-19 21:33 GMT+02:00 Maximilian Bräutigam <m at xbra.de>:

> 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]

Hi Maximilian,

Thanks for your opinion on this. I am aware of the existence of
yaourt, however I'm not particularly fond of it. I prefer to build and
upgrade packages manually; I don't use many packages from the AUR, so
for me it's not an unbearable task :) In a certain sense, I was asking
that question  precisely because I don't use yaourt or similar
helpers. As you said, if a package is dropped to AUR and you are using
an AUR helper, it takes care of updates for you; but if like me you
are doing all manually, you need to know that a package has been moved
to AUR or it won't be updated. Moreover, some packages are downright
removed without being dropped to AUR (e.g. mash).

2014-04-20 14:54 GMT+02:00 Karol Blazewicz <karol.blazewicz at gmail.com>:

> 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.

Hi Karol,

Thanks for the input. A script would partially address my need (one
thing I'd like to know for example, is why a certain package was
removed, which a script can't tell me; package removal without prior
discussion/announce is not the norm, but as I said I've seen it happen
sometimes). Some sort of notification in advance via mailing list (as
suggested by Carl Schaefer) would be ideal for me... it's my
responsibility to keep my sistem clean, I just think it would be
useful to have a nicer way of doing this. Anyway, it's nothing that
keeps me awake at night :) If there's no better way to do this, I
guess a script is the way to go.

Thanks everyone for the responses,

Lorenzo