[aur-general] AUR Cleanup Day organization

[Allan McRae]

Alessio Bolognino wrote:
> 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 - outdated and orphaned packages with few or no votes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 they are out-of-date. Even out-of-date they can still be useful as it's 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 be out-of-date, unmaintained or not very good quality-wise.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 AUR that is out-of-date and doesn't even compile.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 Unless the package is obsolete (e.g. gaim/pidgin) or it is a package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" ?
>
>   
Let me be clear here that I will in now way encourage the deletion of 
anything that may be useful in the future.  I now how annoying it can be 
to have packages you have spent time on deleted from the AUR even if you 
have orphaned them  (who deleted dpkg & rpm...  I am actually quite 
pissed off about that).  This is my reasoning behind creating a list 
first.  That way there is time for people to object to the removals 
before it happens.

As an example, look at the alienarena packages.  I'm reasonably sure 
alienarena2007 is replaced by alienarena.  And I only looked at a couple 
of pages...

Allan