[aur-general] AUR - 'kernel26' search results

[Heiko Baums]

Am 20.09.2010 21:02, schrieb Det:
> Hey, that's great! Stuff like 'online' PKGBUILD editor, auto clean of
> AUR from obsolete/old packages (e.g. over year old packages that don't
> have many votes, have no maintainers and have been flagged out of date
> (if even that)), a little faster updation of the downloadable package
> tarballs after a change has done to the package, some well designed
> *vote orphan* button that'd reduce the "please orphan" requests to TUs
> and other stuff like that? It'd be _very_ nice, if that stuff got
> implemented!

I don't think that this would be so nice. This would mean less control
by the maintainers and TUs. I think requesting such things on the
mailing list would be much better, because then TUs and other people get
to know about this issue, it can be better reviewed and it can be better
discussed on the mailing list if necessary than on the AUR comments etc.

And how do you know if a package which is more than a year old, has only
a few votes and no maintainer doesn't work and is not usable anymore?

That a package has no maintainer just says that the previous maintainer
doesn't want to maintain it anymore because he isn't using this package
anymore, because he switched the distro or something like that.

If a package has only a few votes can mean that it is a special tool
which is not used by many people or it is not well known, which doesn't
mean that it is bad.

If a package was not updated for more than a year can just mean that
there's no need for an update because it's just working and nothing has
to be changed.

And these are things which need to be checked by a human.

An online PKGBUILD editor can be but is not necessarily good because the
maintainer usually has a copy of his package in /var/abs/local or
something like that. So to keep his own copy updated and syncronized
with AUR it's better to make the changes locally, build a new package
and upload it to AUR like it is done now. And I don't think it's so
complicated.

Why a "vote orphan" button? Orphaning is only necessary if the
maintainer doesn't update the package for some time (several weeks)
while upstream has released one or more new versions, and if the
maintainer doesn't reply to comments and private e-mails for several
weeks (at least two or three due to possible holidays). And in this case
it is only necessary if a specific person wants to update and maintain
the package. This is not a democratic question.

So if these conditions are fulfilled then the person who wants to adopt
the package can easily write an e-mail to the mailing list. And a TU can
review it. A package is usually orphaned within minutes, sometimes even
seconds.

That's among others what TUs are for. They are users who are trustworthy
(hopefully ;-) ) and who have some knowledge.

I don't think that it's very trustworthy, if normal users could vote for
orphaning and if a package with enough votes for orphaning would be
deleted automatically. And who will then adopt this package when it is
orphaned? Then you had an orphan just because a handful of impatient
people think the maintainer is not fast enough despite having good
reasons for not updating the package. And believe me there are a lot of
those impatient people out there. I saw this quite often in the comments
for my packages particularly my kernel package. And I'm pretty sure that
most of those voters wouldn't really want to adopt and maintain these
packages.

Btw., this would not reduce the orphan requests. In fact it would
increase the orphans, possibly not the requests but the automatic orphans.

So there should not be done too much automatically in AUR. Doing things
manually could sometimes be better.

Heiko