[aur-general] Deletion of orphaned packages on AUR4

[Lukas Fleischer]

Hi,

There seems to be quite some confusion about the package migration
process and about package deletion. I would like to clarify my point of
view. Hopefully it serves as a basis for discussion (i.e. technical
discussion without attacking anybody personally).

As already mentioned a couple of times, cleaning up the AUR was one of
the incentives for having users resubmit their packages. This has
several advantages:

* Working packages: New users are confused when an AUR package does not
  build. However, packages are often broken because of being outdated or
  unmaintained.

* Less clutter: Working packages are easier to find. Package statistics
  are not distorted.

* Storage: Less space used for packages that do not work. On the AUR
  server and on mirrors.

So please do not upload packages any packages to AUR 4.0.0, unless you
are interested in maintaining them. If a package has not been
resubmitted to the AUR 4.0.0, the maintainer did not care about it for
at least two months. Please either decide to maintain such a package or
wait for somebody else willing to do so.

Along these lines, it might also make sense to generally delete packages
that have been unmaintained for a long time. Maybe have a script to
automatically remove packages that have been orphaned for a couple of
months. Note that we do keep the Git repositories of deleted packages,
so if anybody wants to maintain the package later, he can always clone
the repository of the deleted package, fix the package and simply push
it afterwards. We are also working on a command to revive deleted
packages without having to add a new commit. Package deletion is
equivalent to "hiding it from the website", it does not mean that the
package and all its Git history are gone. Orphaning a package is a
preliminary stage that only tags a package without hiding it.

The "missing dependency" argument was brought up a couple of times. If
you discover such a case, please contact the maintainer of the package
that requires the missing package and ask him to submit it as well. You
should only maintain an AUR package if you are using it, so everybody
should be interested in maintaining dependencies of their packages as
well (unless they are maintained by somebody else already, of course).

Regards,
Lukas