[aur-general] Idea for AUR improvement

[Thorsten Töpper]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2012 23:59:44 +0200
Cédric Girard <girard.cedric at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 10:42 PM, Xyne <xyne at archlinux.ca> wrote:
> 
> > Now that the request is clear, I will say that I don't think this
> > should be done on the AUR itself. As already mentioned, there are
> > not many users who drop everything in the AUR and then come back
> > (even if "they always come back").
> >
> 
> I don't think you should only focus on that particular use case.
> There may be other problems that could be solved by a more generic
> approach.
> 
> What I'm thinking about is having a "last maintainer" field that
> would be displayed and searchable for orphans packages. It would not
> only allow to easily find all packages that were belonging to a
> specific user but would also give an easy way to reach the last
> maintainer of an orphan package to get extra informations before
> adopting it.
> 
> This is just a random thought and may be pointless... What is your
> opinion on this?
> 


It is possible to search by the "Submitter" so it's easily possible to
search for packages that were originally created by oneself and
take them if they are orphans by now. So this part of packages is
covered in any case, coming back or simply having time to maintain
packages in AUR again.

Adding another search field for the last maintainer is in my opinion a
waste of resources. Someone uses an orphaned, there's an upstream
release, so the package is taken, updated and again orphaned as the
time for real maintenance is missing. Someone else who has the time
for this can take the package easily. That is a behaviour I've seen a
lot of times with orphan packages.

For the original idea of this thread this field is not quite useful
in case someone did this with a package one maintained before the time
lacked or one switched distributions, so the package won't show up. The
more general case that one wants contact to the previous maintainer of
the package is usually covered by the list of previous Contributors /
Maintainers in a PKGBUILD - except one does not want to show up there
in this case you already have the package and don't need to search for
it.

Of course the package would show up if nobody touched it, but
comparing the database resources and the real use I still think this
is more a waste of resources than actually useful. Currently there are
37159 packages in the AUR, 9774 of them are orphans that means 27385
packages currently have a maintainer who - in my opinion - do not really
need this.


-- 
Jabber: atsutane at freethoughts.de Blog: http://atsutane.freethoughts.de/
Key: 295AFBF4     FP: 39F8 80E5 0E49 A4D1 1341 E8F9 39E4 F17F 295A FBF4
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 222 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/attachments/20120602/109e8269/attachment.asc>