[aur-general] AUR Cleanup Day organization

[Alessio Bolognino]

On Fri 2008-05-02 12:08 , Eric Belanger wrote:
> On Sat, 3 May 2008, Allan McRae wrote:
>
>> Luká Jirkovský wrote:
>>> But in other way, packages without arch field are usually very, very old.
>>>
>> Then they probably fall in this category of the suggest removal guidelines
>> - outdated and orphaned packages with few or no votes
>>
>>
>> This situation is behind my reasoning to create a list of potential 
>> removals first.  I think we need to be careful of removing too many 
>> packages, especially in our first cleanup attempt.  Just the really 
>> unneeded ones as a first step.  I had even considered that once the list 
>> was made, then I would archive all the relevant PKGBUILDs before deleting 
>> them. But it would be better to just not delete useful packages in the 
>> first place...
>
> I don't think it's a good idea to remove orphaned packages simply because 
> they are out-of-date. Even out-of-date they can still be useful as it's 
> better than having no PKGBUILD at all and maybe someone will adopt them 
> eventually.  That's the reason why we call it unsupported: the PKGBUILD can 
> be out-of-date, unmaintained or not very good quality-wise.  A lot of work 
> has been invested in these PKGBUILD.

I totally agree with Eric here. 
I'm a bit worried about this "cleanup frenzy": there is a package in the
AUR that is out-of-date and doesn't even compile. Why should we
remove it? As Eric said, it's better than nothing.

Unless the package is obsolete (e.g. gaim/pidgin) or it is a package
already in the repos, IMHO there is no need to remove it.

If a PKGBUILD contains errors, fix it, if you want to, but do not remove
it. What about a "bug-fix day" instead of a "cleanup day" ?

-- 
Alessio (molok) Bolognino

Please send personal email to themolok at gmail.com

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