[aur-general] pkgstats and community - attempt 2

[Allan McRae]

This whole thing has got a bit out of hand...   All I wanted to do was 
organize a meeting for TUs to discuss the results of the pkgstats 
script.  And now I arrive back to ~70 email with back and forward about 
how things should be.  I am actually quite disappointed with some of the 
responses there.

I'll put this out there first before I carry on with this email.  I am a 
dev. I am a TU.  I do not care about titles and my only aim here is to 
serve the Arch community better.  I am not taking a dev or TU point of 
view here at all.  I may not have been around as long as others but I 
know the history of the community repo and the AUR voting system. 

That being said, the pkgstats results point to a problem in the 
[community] repo.  I suggested we should discuss this on IRC at some 
stage.  ~70 emails later, that option seems to have been forgotten.

So here is the issue:
* There is no point taking up server space and bandwidth with packages 
that nobody or very, very few people use. *

pkgstats points to a few hundred packages that fall into the not very 
used category in both [extra] and [community].  The devs are discussing 
what to with packages in [extra].  Note that does not necessarily mean 
those packages are automatically dropped to the AUR as that make no 
sense for some packages.  I.e. compromise is being made.  Please read 
that again.  Compromise...

So we need to think about what the purpose of the [community] repo is.  
It is obviously to supplement [core] and [extra].  Packages in [core] 
are the base of a system, packages in [extra] define Arch as a distro 
and are widely used by its users, packages in [community] do what?

So lets start there.  What should the [community] repo be doing?  What 
is its purpose?   There is no point discussing anything else until that 
is well defined. 

All responses must start with "The [community] repo is ..."

Allan