[aur-general] [community] repository cleanup

[Evangelos Foutras]

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On 17/11/10 05:21, Brad Fanella wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 9:04 PM, Kaiting Chen <kaitocracy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Before anyone gets any more worked up I wanted to point out that there are
>> only 27 Trusted Users and 32 Developers. In the official repository there
>> are around 4848 packages altogether. That averages out to 82.169 packages
>> per person which is kind of ridiculous considering the Developers have to
>> develop and the Trusted Users have other responsibilities as well.
>>
>> So I think this binary -> source phenomenon is just the best that we can do
>> given how shorthanded we all are. I think the philosophy is that anyone can
>> adopt in [unsupported], and if no Developer or Trusted User will adopt a
>> binary package then we should at least give the concerned user a chance to
>> adopt it.
>>
>> Honestly if it were up to me I would remove half of the packages from the
>> official repositories and stick them in the AUR because past 40 your
>> packages start to develop major Quantity over Quality issues and I don't
>> think that's what we're going for.
>>
>> I think this would be a much more constructive conversation if we all
>> stopped complaining about the situation and started talking about how to
>> improve the AUR. --Kaiting.
>>
>> --
>> Kiwis and Limes: http://kaitocracy.blogspot.com/
>>
> 
> That's not a very good argument.
> 
> Sergej Pupykin: 1480 packages
> Jan de Groot: 1094 packages
> Andrea Scarpino: 809 packages
> 
> They all do an excellent job with maintaining a massive amount of
> packages at one time. Therefore, it obviously can be done without the
> "quantity over quality" issue that you speak of.

I strongly agree with Kaiting. In my opinion, more than 50-60 packages
is pushing it.

I doubt the numbers you posted are accurate. For example, (and if I'm
not mistaken,) Andrea maintains lots of KDE packages which are split
into many sub-packages. The number of actual PKGBUILDs is significantly
smaller. This fact makes maintaining all these (sub-)packages much
easier. For more precise measurements, you could grep through all
PKGBUILDs in /var/abs:

  $ grep -r '# Maintainer' /var/abs | grep -c Scarpino
  152

  $ grep -r '# Maintainer' /var/abs | grep -c Groot
  456

  $ grep -r '# Maintainer' /var/abs | grep -c Pupykin
  708

Moreover, for a conservative maintenance time estimation of 10
minutes/package/month, you will need to spend 10 hours each month,
updating and solving bugs, for every 60 packages you own. This doesn't
scale very well; if you had 300 packages, you'd need to set aside 50
hours each month.

Let's not forget we're talking about orphan packages here. This means
that nobody is interested in maintaining them. Why exactly should they
stay in [community], when someone who cares about them can adopt and
maintain them properly in the AUR?

- -- 
Evangelos Foutras
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