[aur-general] Idea for AUR improvement

[Heiko Baums]

Am Sat, 02 Jun 2012 01:23:46 +0200
schrieb Christian Stadegaart <e-mail at bewust-leven.nl>:

> You were not sharing an opinion, you were sharing facts, right? I
> advise you to be careful with the words you choose.

Why? Answer my questions, and you will see that it's true. In the most
cases you will come to the same conclusion than me.

What do you think, why a maintainer has orphaned a package or a package
was orphaned by a TU? Maybe the maintainer isn't interested in
maintaining it anymore?

The reason why someone orphans a package himself is in most cases that
he is not interested in this package anymore. This can have several
reasons.

The most common reasons are:
- He switches the distro from Arch to another one.
- He doesn't use this package anymore and don't want to maintain it
anymore.
- He doesn't have time enough to maintaining the package.
- There are major issues with the source package, and he doesn't want
to spend too much time in patching the package.
And many more. In most cases it's pretty unlikely that the previous
maintainer wants to get the package back.

And in the first case (switching the distro back to Arch Linux), I'm
pretty sure that the maintainer still knows which packages he has
maintained or he just looks for outdated, and orphaned packages he
wants to use, like he was a new user.

The reason why a package is orphaned by a TU is:
- The package is outdated, the maintainer doesn't update it, and
doesn't respond to the out-of-date flag, comments and e-mails within
two weeks.

You also can be pretty sure that the previous maintainer doesn't want
the package back.

So why would you give those packages automatically back to
those previous maintainers who are not interested in them anymore?

If I would orphan a package - and I already did this with a few - I
would be pretty annoyed if an AUR automatism would see that those
packages are orphaned, and assign them to me again, because there have
been reasons why I have orphaned the package before.

So, no reason for an automatism.

> Your facts are based on *your* view and interpretation on the whole
> and prevent this subject to be discussed any further by stating it's
> a pointless idea just because the facts (read: the information you
> found and interpreted as facts) are saying so.

Not really an interpretation. See above.

> I think Marcin's idea is not that bad. I wouldn't suggest it to be
> the way he writes, but some automation might be welcome. I don't have
> enough knowledge to come with another idea though.

What I think what you mean - and this is indeed an interpretation -, is
writing a helper (a search function) for finding packages someone has
maintained before, and adding a function (a button or the like) to
adopt those packages again. Well, I don't have anything against this.
I'm not sure if this is necessary, because, like I said before, I guess
that everybody knows which packages he has maintained previously. But
why not? For people who maintained about 100 packages this can be
helpful.

But this has not much to do with an automation, this is rather a
search function and a helper.

Heiko