[aur-general] Proposal: Mass AUR Cleanup

[Ray Rashif]

On 4 October 2010 04:51, Isaac Dupree <ml at isaac.cedarswampstudios.org> wrote:
> On 10/03/10 16:05, Ray Rashif wrote:
>>
>> On 4 October 2010 01:54, Jakob Gruber<jakob.gruber at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>>  Hi TUs,
>>>
>>> I've just created a new proposal concerning the orphaning of all packages
>>> marked 'out of date' which have not been updated (or submitted) since
>>> before
>>> January 1st, 2009. For details, see the actual proposal text.
>>>
>>> The voting period ends on October 10th, please cast your votes!
>>
>> Jakob, would it be possible for you to parse the e-mail address of the
>> current maintainer, and for each package send an e-mail? The template
>> could look like this:
>>
>> """
>> Subject: [AUR][$pkgname] Orphan candidate
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> Your package '$pkgname' [1] is a candidate to be orphaned, as per the
>> out-of-date and inactivity list generated recently [2]. If you do not
>> update '$pkgname' by the 10th of October 2010, it will be
>> automatically orphaned.
>> ...
>
> maybe just something like, "If you wish to continue maintaining it and are
> able to do so, please re-adopt and update it or state why this cannot be
> done?"
>
> ...Orphaning generally isn't a very harmful act.
>
> And/or we could go by the one-by-one orphaning principle of giving
> maintainers a couple weeks to respond to email.  It's likely many of these
> maintainers won't respond because they've been inactive on AUR for a year
> and a half; and if they do respond, it's evidence that they're active enough
> to warrant a not-so-automatic process perhaps?
>
> (So the critical date of orphaning then should/would probably be later than
> 10th October.)

The latest list Jakob generated (also thanks to Xyne's prompt
response) deals with this safely. We don't need to care or waste time
with packages whose maintainers have disappeared for more than a year,
almost 2 years.