On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:10 PM, Heiko Baums <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I know I'm crossposting this, but this rather belongs to arch-general > than to aur-general. > > Am Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:19:40 -0500 > schrieb Kaiting Chen <kaitocracy@xxxxxxxxx>: > >> I think it's kind of hard for me to see why I should maintain a >> package that's already been discarded by its developer. In my opinion >> such packages should be moved to [unsupported] where the one more two >> people who might want to use them can simply build them themselves. > > Why should those packages be removed from the repos as long as they are > running? That doesn't make sense. And such packages doesn't make any > work for the developers. They can just be staying in the repos without > doing any harm like e.g. eboard. You got my point. > > Regarding ding as an example doesn't make much work for the devs > because it's updated by upstream every two years. And this package is > really popular at least in Germany, because it's an English-German > dictionary. And this tool is really old - but not outdated and > unmainted. It's one of the first Linux applications and available in > every repo of every distro. > > And the question is not cleaning up the repos in principle. The > question is this mass cleanup and the removal of several popular and > important packages even if they are orphaned. > > If there's an orphan quite popular then an unorphaned packages which is > not popular or important could be moved to AUR and the orphaned and > more popular package could be adopted by this dev. Just an example. > > squashfs-tools are necessary for building LiveCDs incl. the Arch Linux > installation CD as far as I know. So I'm not sure if this package > actually wouldn't belong to [core]. > > btrfs-progs also doesn't belong to AUR. This package belongs into > [core] and should be supported by AIF. Even if it's still marked as > experimental, many people in the web report that it's pretty stable and > that it's only missing an fsck. And many people report that it's > usable on systems which don't need to be absolutely reliable. > > Btw., instead of the stable package btrfs-progs there's a package > btrfs-progs-unstable in [extra] which really makes sense as the repos > are meant to be stable repos. > > eboard, a still working and good chess GUI, was moved from [extra] to > AUR. It's not maintained by upstream anymore but it's still working, > it's quite popular and doesn't make any work for the devs. Having this > in [extra] means there's a compiled and working package which doesn't > need to be maintained. Having this package in AUR means that every user > who wants to install this package must compile this package by himself. > So what sense does this cleanup make? It makes completely no sense! > > epdfviewer is a very popular because lightweight PDF viewer for GTK. > Galculator is the best calculator for GTK I know and also quite > popular, at lest recommended quite often e.g. in the Xfce wiki. What's > such a package doing in AUR? > > And, please, don't tell me anything about missing interest of the devs. > As if every dev is using every package which he maintains himself or > every dev only maintains only packages he is using himself. > > This is what I name and shame. > > This mass cleanup was just done inconsiderately. > > I really respect the voluntary work of the devs and TUs. And I really > honor their work in their spare time. And I don't expect too much. But > if a repo shall be cleaned up this must be done a lot more considered. We are practical people, aren't we? Please reconsider this cleanup, thanks. I don't mean it's bad, but please reconsider some. > > Heiko >
