[aur-general] AUR mass deletion, why?

[alad]

On 04/05/2021 09:52, Fabian Bornschein via aur-general wrote:
>
> Am Di, 4. Mai 2021 um 07:01:54 +0000 schrieb George Rawlinson via 
> aur-general <aur-general at lists.archlinux.org>:
>> On 21-05-04 08:23, Fabian Bornschein via aur-general wrote:
>>>  For fcgu-keyring I have had filled a removal request, so this one was
>>>  deliberate to be erased. For everything else it would be nice to 
>>> know the
>>>  reason for this, in case I do something essential wrong.
>>>
>>>  Thank you.
>>
>> Hi Fabian,
>>
>> As per my previous email; while responding to your removal request, I
>> had a look at your other packages and noticed that a lot of them are
>> packages shipping custom configurations.
>>
>> The AUR is not meant to be a repository for personal items and as such,
>> the packages shipping dotfiles were deleted. Please read the AUR
>> submission guidelines, found here:
>>
>> https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_submission_guidelines
>>
>> -- 
>> George Rawlinson
>
>
> Hi George,
> it looks like GMail doesn't like EMails. I've got the deletion 
> notification but no other EMail. (Not even in spam). Strange, but back 
> to topic.
>
> Yes, many of them where preconfigurations of some sort, but not in a 
> "specific for me system"-way, but kept generic so everyone can use 
> them. In fact, I barely use any of them myself, but kept them up 
> because someone asked me to keep them around.

The wiki specifically documents configurations so users can understand 
what they do and adapt them as they wish. They don't belong as separate 
packages in the AUR. This especially holds for trivial changes such as 
blacklisting modules or enabling systemd services.

Some other remarks:

unlock-pacman: if there's a stale pacman lock that means the user should 
investigate why it happened (e.g. interruption during an update) rather 
than automatically delete it. Packages offering this kind of 
functionality should never be uploaded.

Keyrings: Grey area as some are directly related to building packages 
(eg. debian-keyring, archlinuxarm-keyring) while others are purely to 
support users of an unofficial repo unrelated to the AUR (eg. 
chaotic-keyring).

>
> None of them are in my opinion really specialized or specific for me 
> alone and almost all of them add something of value to a users system. 
> I can't find something that preconfigurations, wallpapers, udev-rules 
> or "keyrings" are not allowed on the AUR either in 
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_submission_guidelines. So I'm a 
> pretty shocked by that move.

Common sense is advised. When you upload packages with things like

post_upgrade() { printf "\nThanks for still using my pkg 😊\n\n"; } or

post_install() { printf "This is for Testing RN; please report back\n\n"; }

in the install script it should be no surprise these packages are 
treated with suspicion and eventually deleted. However, requests are 
used to leave a paper trail and (egregious cases aside) leave the 
maintainer some time to respond. I'd suggest anyone to use that system 
where they are able.

Alad