Intro: Below are some questions / ideas I came up with. I simply don't know if anyone cares about these issues, whether there are rules or at least suggestions how to best deal with them or is it up to the maintainer. I've heard there were some plans wrt a build server that would periodically check if packages still build. Any news? If there indeed are issues that need fixing, should I file the low-priority bugs now? Summer vacation may not be the best time for Arch-related work so maybe I should wait until September so that people are back from holidays? Upstream urls: I found that dozens of packages in the repos have an upstream url that prints 'Page Not Found' in one way or another. Should I open bug reports for these packages or does nobody care about it? I could also check if the source is still available. If opening bug reports is OK, should I limit creating the reports to e.g. 10 a day? If I find a url that works, I will include it as a suggestion for the maintainer. For example for https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/autocutsel/ neither the url nor the source is available, but I found what seems like a perfectly good autocutsel website: http://www.nongnu.org/autocutsel/ with a link to the source. Some projects seem to be gone for good e.g. https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/apricots/ even grabs the sources from ftp.archlinux.org https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/plain/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/apricots Would http://freecode.com/projects/apricots be a better website? It has some info e.g. that last development is from a decade ago, a screenshot, a longer description ... What about urls that point to a redirect? Is it OK only if the redirect is automatic and otherwise upstream urls should be updated if they moved e.g. from SourceForge to GoogleCode? An example: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/junit/ has http://junit.sourceforge.net/ as the upstream url, but when you go there, it says 'Please see our main site at junit.org'. Is there a rule that 'www' should be omitted or that it should be included? https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/alsa-lib/ : http://www.alsa-project.org https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/alsa-firmware/ : http://alsa-project.org/ What about the slash at the end of the url? Sometimes the slash makes a difference: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/pidgin-toobars/ uses http://vayurik.ru/wordpress/en/toobars/ and shows (via a redirect) the Russian version http://vayurik.ru/wordpress/toobars while the English version demands no slash at the end of the url: http://vayurik.ru/wordpress/en/toobars The same upstream url can be used by many packages and standardizing would make it a bit easier to find which packages need to have the upstream url updated. Are upstream urls mandatory? https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/hwdetect/ does not have one. Package descriptions: There was an attempt at improving the descriptions last year, but it didn't go so well https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/commit/trunk?h=packages/bitcoin&id=bd4647fb433c517c03fb08f869944dc987372a69 I don't know if maintainers should write package descriptions or should they just take them from upstream, but IMHO e.g. https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/kdeplasma-addons-wallpapers-virus/ : 'Description: Virus' has to go. Even https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/kdeplasma-addons-wallpapers-weather/ - Weather or https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/kdetoys-ktux/ - KTux are pretty bad descriptions. Quite a few descriptions could be more informative, but I don't know if anyone cares about it e.g. description for https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/kdeutils-ktimer/ says 'Countdown Launcher' and is IMHO too terse. Should I suggest changing it upstream, will the maintainer change it to a more descriptive one or is it considered just pointless churn? Similarly, https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/kdeplasma-addons-applets-calculator/ could be described as e.g. 'A simple calculator' instead of the current 'Calculate simple sums'. Is adding 'data files' phrase to descriptions of packages that provide architecture-independent data recommended? I've noticed many packages share the same description, usually because it's a generic one: monica - A monitor calibration tool kdegraphics-kgamma - A monitor calibration tool or because the packages represent different version of e.g. the same toolkit: qt3 - A cross-platform application and UI framework qt4 - A cross-platform application and UI framework Sometimes the descriptions explicitly says it's a python2 thing: python2-atspi - Python 2 bindings for at-spi python2-dbus - Python 2.7 bindings for DBUS Some language-related packages use the same description for all of them e.g. xpdf-korean - Encoding information to use specific character sets in Xpdf; does not include fonts vim-spell-af - Language files for Vim spell checking Other packages, like firefox-i18n-* or libreoffice-* adjusted the description for each package: firefox-i18n-af - Afrikaans language pack for Firefox libreoffice-af - Afrikaans language pack for LibreOffice Is one way preferred over the other or is it up to the maintainer? Should language files always have a description that says which language do they represent or are package names enough? I also found https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/libreoffice-sid/ - ??? language pack for LibreOffice https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/libreoffice-tt/ - TT ? language pack for LibreOffice What's this?
