[aur-general] [community] repository cleanup

[Heiko Baums]

Am Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:19:40 -0500
schrieb Kaiting Chen <kaitocracy at gmail.com>:

> I think it's kind of hard for me to see why I should maintain a
> package that's already been discarded by its developer. In my opinion
> such packages should be moved to [unsupported] where the one more two
> people who might want to use them can simply build them themselves.

Why should those packages be removed from the repos as long as they are
running? That doesn't make sense. And such packages doesn't make any
work for the developers. They can just be staying in the repos without
doing any harm like e.g. eboard.

Regarding ding as an example doesn't make much work for the devs
because it's updated by upstream every two years. And this package is
really popular at least in Germany, because it's an English-German
dictionary. And this tool is really old - but not outdated and
unmainted. It's one of the first Linux applications and available in
every repo of every distro.

And the question is not cleaning up the repos in principle. The
question is this mass cleanup and the removal of several popular and
important packages even if they are orphaned.

If there's an orphan quite popular then an unorphaned packages which is
not popular or important could be moved to AUR and the orphaned and
more popular package could be adopted by this dev. Just an example.

squashfs-tools are necessary for building LiveCDs incl. the Arch Linux
installation CD as far as I know. So I'm not sure if this package
actually wouldn't belong to [core].

btrfs-progs also doesn't belong to AUR. This package belongs into
[core] and should be supported by AIF. Even if it's still marked as
experimental, many people in the web report that it's pretty stable and
that it's only missing an fsck. And many people report that it's
usable on systems which don't need to be absolutely reliable.

Btw., instead of the stable package btrfs-progs there's a package
btrfs-progs-unstable in [extra] which really makes sense as the repos
are meant to be stable repos.

eboard, a still working and good chess GUI, was moved from [extra] to
AUR. It's not maintained by upstream anymore but it's still working,
it's quite popular and doesn't make any work for the devs. Having this
in [extra] means there's a compiled and working package which doesn't
need to be maintained. Having this package in AUR means that every user
who wants to install this package must compile this package by himself.
So what sense does this cleanup make? It makes completely no sense!

epdfviewer is a very popular because lightweight PDF viewer for GTK.
Galculator is the best calculator for GTK I know and also quite
popular, at lest recommended quite often e.g. in the Xfce wiki. What's
such a package doing in AUR?

And, please, don't tell me anything about missing interest of the devs.
As if every dev is using every package which he maintains himself or
every dev only maintains only packages he is using himself.

This is what I name and shame.

This mass cleanup was just done inconsiderately.

I really respect the voluntary work of the devs and TUs. And I really
honor their work in their spare time. And I don't expect too much. But
if a repo shall be cleaned up this must be done a lot more considered.

Heiko