[aur-general] AUR cleanup

[Stefan Wilkens]

2011/11/7 Nicola Bignami <nicola at kernel-panic.dnsdojo.net>:
> 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 2400 are also flagged out of date (some packages have not been updated since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 are only waiting to be scrapped as they're already been replaced by some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.
>

Keeping the user repository clean and up-to-date sounds very KISS and
Arch to me, but some criteria should be stated. Many packages that
depend on python v2, for instance, are simply broken because they were
not properly updated to reflect repository changes [1]. The goal with
these packages should likely be to adapt the build, not consider them
broken.

Perhaps create a page on the wiki so that this work can be shared with
others in the community. Such a page might also allow us to have a
nice final list that can be fed to the nearest TU in one go, rather
than a flood of deletion requests.

Should you initiate this, I would surely help out. Who knows what fun
software one might run into :)

[1] http://www.archlinux.org/news/python-is-now-python-3/