[aur-general] Transition users from package x to package y (package x deprecated)

[Emil Lundberg]

Hi Michael,

I had the same problem the other day, with package passmenu-notify-git
replacing pass-patched-passmenu-notify-git. There is the `replaces`
directive in PKGBUILD, but I don't think that really works to automate
replacement for AUR packages. I don't know if there's a standard procedure,
but here's what I ended up doing.

At the bare minimum, add and pin to the replaced package a comment
documenting the new package to use. I also flagged my package as out of
date.

Next, I changed the package description to "DEFUNCT: Use <new-package>
instead". Then I intentionally broke the package by removing all the
sources and having `package()` just print an error message redirecting to
the new package, then unconditionally fail. I also added `epoch=1` to the
PKGBUILD to help this version of the package override other releases. If
this seems too aggressive for your package, you could instead just add a
warning message in `package()` and in the post-install/post-upgrade script.
In my case the old package was already broken.

Hope that helps with some ideas on how to approach the issue! I'd be
interested to hear others' thoughts too.

/Emil

On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, 11:18 Michael Kogan via aur-general, <
aur-general at archlinux.org> wrote:

> Hi guys,
>
> I maintain the multiload-ng AUR packages, in particular
> xfce4-plugin-multiload-ng-gtk2 and xfce4-plugin-multiload-ng-gtk3. After
> the recent Xfce 4.16 update the gtk2 version stopped building, so I would
> like to delete xfce4-plugin-multiload-ng-gtk2 and somehow migrate the users
> to xfce4-plugin-multiload-ng-gtk3 (which should be renamed to just
> xfce4-plugin-multiload-ng if possible). What are my options making the
> transition as smooth as possible?
>
> Thanks for any input and merry Christmas!
> Michael
>