[aur-general] some questions mainly about deletion...

[zoorat]

Hi everyone,
I have been hunting for broken packages and filing deletion requests against them for a while now...
afaik, only 2 rejections in more than 500 requests.
maybe, I should have asked those questions much earlier... anyway...

1. to TU's, how do you guys are checking if a package should be deleted or not ??
I want to know it to make the right call and not to spam...

I'm kinda asking for a list of scenarios with some comments...
example list from my experience:
"broken dependency and orphan" dead for sure.
"problem was reposted a long time ago and not fixed" dead.
"Flagged out-of-date" better giving this info while making the request.
"orphan but nothing broken" false request.

you can also tell me, what makes a package is good and healthy...

2. how to file deletion requests for split packages ??
tried to find out about it but google was unhelpful...

when I file a deletion request, it is going to be a request for the base package like the vote. isn't it??
then if one of the base packages is broken and needed to be removed then what I should do then ?? file a request saying it's for only that package ??
or tell the maintainer to remove that package's code from the PKGBUILD ??
and what I should do if the package is orphan ??

3. inactive maintainer is not fixed...

there is a lot of packages which is not orphan but the maintainer is not fixing the problem after reporting.
saw this a lot when I was testing font packages...
what should I do in this case ??

If it's a package not being dependent on others, can I file a deletion request after a certain time ?? how long should I wait ??
If the answer to the last question is "disown and maintain" and if I'm not interested in maintaining that package,
how I should let other people know who might want to maintain ?? this aur-general mailing list ??

4. font source problem...

I tested 1104 font packages that start with 'ttf-' or 'otf-' (got the list on 2021-11-17)
if their source works and checksum matches or not and also for broken dependency.

Font sources are weird.
like
for some, you need the browser to download (you know how mega.nz downloads),
certificate error on curl/wget but not on firefox,
file hash changes like fontspace.com,
the URL is temporary,
the original source is dead but you know there is a lot of mirrors.

it's pretty common... so can I ask maintainers to
download from a mirror that is not in archwiki/Font_package_guidelines,
or set up a github/lab mirror themselves and download from there ??

or should they make the package like "ttf-ms-win10" which lets the user know how to get the file to make this package ??
don't know if this kinda package is allowed...

5. how to get the exact number of requests I had to make and how many of them got accepted...
do you know any easy to get that info??
or do I have to somehow parse and count mbox files from aur-requests archives?

Don't know if I'm nitpicking...
Tell me, if I'm doing something wrong or not.

yours,
zoorat.
p.s. I hope I didn't mess up anything.