[aur-general] AUR cleanup

[Sven-Hendrik Haase]

On 07.11.2011 18:41, Nicola Bignami wrote:
> I see that there are more than 6700 orphan packages. Of those, more
> than 2400 are also flagged out of date (some packages have not been
> updated since 2007).
> Many packages are only waiting for a new maintainer but I think that
> many are only waiting to be scrapped as they're already been replaced
> by some other package in the AUR or in the community repository (or
> just become obsolete).
>
> I'm wondering if the time has come to look into them to find out what
> worth to keep and what have to be removed and thus do some cleanup.
>
> If can be useful, I can start working on it.
Of course, clean up work like that is always appreciated. Keep in mind
though that people might resubmit missing but obsolete software to AUR.
Technically, there is no rule against that.

So in case you do this work, you should look for packages that truly
have no need for existence anymore as opposed to merely software that
somebody forked and improved. Dead upstream sucks but it's no an
immediate reason to drop something from AUR. in my opinion.

Good candidates for deletion: Unmaintained downstream variants of
software patched with various little things, software that switched vcs
but has old vcs packages remaining in AUR, totally broken and
unmaintained software, renamed packages that didn't get deleted. You get
the idea.

-- Sven-Hendrik