[arch-general] Official repos package removal policies/best practices

[Štěpán Němec]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2017 19:03:43 +0100
Morten Linderud wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 06:34:11PM +0100, Štěpán Němec wrote:

[...]

>> 1.
>> What is the best way to find rationale about package removal or old
>> package logs in general? E.g. pacolog doesn't work on st any more (I
>> guess the logs are removed together with the package?) and even looking
>> for the message linked above felt like there should be a better way.
>
> Looked at the pacolog source, it acts on the branch from the git.archlinux.org
> website, this is essentially useless when the package is removed from the repos
> as the website goes away with it. You could search the git logs on the
> git.archlinux.org page, but thats tedious. I don't know of any better way sadly.
>
>> 2.
>> If the commit message above is the only resource to be had, is there
>> some kind of best practices concerning similar commit messages? I would
>> have appreciated at least a short rationale for the removal being
>> included.
>
> I honestly don't know if there is any policy regarding this, I shared the mail
> to the other TUs and I'll see what they think. However! Yes, I agree. The commit
> message is horrendous and I'll do better in the future!
>
>> 3.
>> What was the rationale in this particular case? The st-git¹ AUR package
>> seems quite popular, so I was surprised to see its non-vcs version
>> removed from community (I would expect the opposite to happen for
>> popular packages).
>> 
>> ¹ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/st-git/
>
> st is suppose to be compiled with your own config.h along with it. It hasn't
> really had any release and after some discussion among other TUs, we decided to
> drop both st and dwm for this reason. After some complaints on reddit[1] I
> uploaded the old PKGBUILDs to AUR for the sake of being refferences.
>
> [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/7e52e4/st_package_removed/
>
> I hope this answers your questions!

Thank you very much for the information! (Note to self: have to search
Reddit as well next time; Google seems not to have indexed the
discussion there yet, although interestingly DuckDuckGo does, now I
checked...)

(Readding arch-general, for some reason the headers of my original
message seem not to have made it through unmangled.)

-- 
Štěpán