[aur-general] About orphaning all packages of inactive users

[Anatol Pomozov]

Hi

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 2:24 PM, Alexander Rødseth <rodseth at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> Some of these packages are out of date and some have better PKGBUILDs
> in the comments:
> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?K=phi&SeB=m
>
> Last activity from the user was over two years ago: 2011-03-17 (the
> brother-hl2030 package)
>
> The two packages that are out of date has not been updated for three years.
>
> My plan is to orphan all his packages if nobody thinks that's a
> horribly bad idea.

As an Arch/AUR user I completely support your idea.

It will make easier for users to adopt and keep improving the
packages. Some users feel shy to ask maillist about disowning others
packages. Other users think that waiting weeks (i.e. email
notification) for disowning is too long - they want to fix the package
right here and right now.

IMHO Arch developers should be more proactive in disowning de-facto
orphaned packages. Something like "if a package is marked out-of-date
for more than 3 months then it disowns automatically". Similar rule
can be applied to all packages of inactive users.

> I'm also interested in comments about what should be done for similar
> situations in the future. I assume most users would be happy just to
> see the pacakges being updated instead of hoarded and would think it
> was fine if TUs just orphan them after a similar investigation of the
> situation.
>
> --
> Sincerely,
>   Alexander Rødseth
>   xyproto / TU