[aur-dev] Handling deletion through the web interface.

[Peter Lewis]

Hi Loui,

On Monday 20 September 2010 at 02:23 Loui Chang wrote:
> Hi Peter. Thanks for sending in these patches.
> I really don't know when I'll be able to give these a fair look however.

No problem - so sorry for sending more :-)

I've actually spent today taking another look at how this can be accomplished, 
and since it seems that we should require users to give reasons for deletion 
requests, which then get forwarded to aur-general (otherwise the automated 
emails aren't too useful), I've reimplemented some of it in a slightly 
different way.

Basically I put the bulk of it in pkgedit.php rather than pkgfuncs.inc, 
imitating the way category changes happen. This means that in my 
implementation:

- Users are now required to give a reason when requesting deletion, from a 
list. Hopefully this will make people think / check.

- When a package has a pending deletion request, this is displayed on the 
package page.

- Users can leave a comment (and should in most cases), which gets forwarded 
to the list in the deletion proposal and can start any discussion.

- The maintainer and everyone on the notify list also gets an email, letting 
them know that the package is up for deletion (with the reasons) and this will 
be discussed on aur-general.

- TUs and devs can cancel deletion requests (preferably following discussion 
on the list), ordinary users can't.

- On the downside, bulk deletion proposals aren't possible, since reasons have 
to be given per package on the pkgedit.php page. Bulk cancelations are 
possible though, in case of abuse.

- It should be fairly easy to add and amend valid reasons for proposing 
deletion, since these are just extra variables in the http post, which get 
sent to the mailing list. They're not stored in the database (seemed overkill 
to me).

(Five related) patches to follow shortly (and don't bother with the previous 
ones I sent, these include that stuff).


> The AUR really needs someone to step up to keep it going now.

Well, once I'm a bit more comfortable with the code and processes and stuff, 
I'd be happy to help.

Cheers,

Pete.


PS. There's a bit of duplication of code here, but if the general idea is 
accepted, then I'll work on factoring some of it out later.