[aur-general] AUR cleanup

[Nicola Bignami]

----- Messaggio originale -----
> 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 than 2400 are also flagged out of date (some packages have not been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.

I know.
 
> 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.

That's exactly what I have in mind, and that's why IMHO it's necessary look carefully to the packages and not just delete them because they're orphan and out of date.

> -- Sven-Hendrik