[aur-general] Handling coincidental name collisions

Xyne xyne at archlinux.ca
Sat Feb 9 13:34:55 UTC 2019


Hi everyone,

This is in regard to this thread on the forum:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=244051

The packaged contained this project:
https://github.com/Aniket-Pradhan/lsd

To summarize the thread, an AUR package that had existed for a while was
deleted when an unrelated package of the same name was moved to [community].
The reason given was that the AUR package was "not useful enough", either
because it only had 2 votes or because the acting TU saw no personal use for it.

For trivial packages, it would be good to at least clarify the reason for
deletion in a little more detail. There are plenty of AUR packages that persist
for years with 0 votes so a maintainer with 2 votes may be understandably
confused by the terse statement "not useful enough". A little clarification can
easily disperse that confusion and better guide the user through future
contributions.

However, "trivial" here usually means that someone uploaded a bash script to do
something like open arandr and click on it with xdotool to save half a second,
or baked some convoluted ls-cat-cat-grep-cat-sed-cat pipe into a 3-line script.
The project involved here is not in the same category. It may not be practically
"useful" for many users, but it does do something that is not trivial to
replicated in a few lines of shell code. It's "usefulness" is subjective.

In this case, the TU should have proposed renaming the package, given the
maintainer some time to pick a new name and re-upload the package, and then
merged the old one. Even a single vote from another user can be encouraging so
the merge is worthwhile unless the maintainer states otherwise.

Regards,
Xyne


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