[aur-general] AUR Cleanup Day organization

[Mikko Seppälä]

Allan McRae wrote:
> 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 - outdated and orphaned packages with few or no votes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 because they are out-of-date. Even out-of-date they can still be 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 it unsupported: the PKGBUILD can be out-of-date, unmaintained or not 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 AUR that is out-of-date and doesn't even compile.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 Unless the package is obsolete (e.g. gaim/pidgin) or it is a package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
>
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Btw OT but I was the one who added dpkg (along with po4a), mainly used 
dpkg-deb from it to play with deb packages.

Still should have old PKGBUILDs lying around if you want :p