[aur-general] Orphan packages, Policy on bots

[David Phillips]

Hi all, I've been looking at writing a small bot which will crawl over
orphaned packages' PKGBUILDs, performing analysis and gathering stats.

For example, I'm really keen on making an attempt to clean a bunch of
them up. 25% of the 53587 packages in the AUR today are orphans and,
like many others, I'd like to see this number decreased. In the past,
I have manually gone down the list of orphans, but that's just
horrible and slow (also, can't get my browser to do HTTP head
requests). So naturally, I started writing a bot.

I did start thinking about having the bot comment on packages with
dead end sources, but soon realised this would complicate things too
much if it were to stop repeating itself each time it is run etc.
Being able to pull various lists (for humans, not bots, to act up) out
of a magic hat.

As a random example, it'd be useful to pull out a list of packages which:

* Are orhpans
* Have less than five votes
* Have dead end sources
* Haven't been updated in the last year

So we could send a couple of people to, eg, adopt or file appropriate requests.

So anyway, I've seen wiki bots doing their thing on our wiki, but
what's the policy on AUR bots?

-- 
Four word witty remark