Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

Question

[oh@Alice][~/projects/clean-aur/aur-mirror]% echo * | wc -w
55989
[oh@Alice][~/projects/clean-aur/aur-mirror]% grep -lR --include PKGBUILD '_.*root' | wc -l
6759
[oh@Alice][~/projects/clean-aur/aur-mirror]% grep -RL --include PKGBUILD 'package()' | wc -l
19339
The numbers pretty much speaks for them self. There are thousands of packages using old PKGBUILD syntax in aur. 34.54% of all aur packages will stop working at pacman 4.2 release. If you also count packages that are plain broken, duplications, outdated and so on, I would not be supriced if the total number is close to 50%,
In my not so humble evil overlord of everything™<insert evil laughter and dramatic music here> opinion something drastic should be done. I propose that we set a time limit, if there have not been a major improvement in the overall quality of aur by that date, the current aur is moved as a backup and aur.archlinux.org is started again with a clean db. Active maintainers of packages can then easily reupload their packages (or perhaps a button on the backup page to move the package over).
Last edited by Mr.Elendig (2014-01-03 14:33:24)

Answer 1

sanskritfritz wrote:I'm afraid a wipe would really too drastic, as some valuable information would get lost, especially the comments on packages that worked once, and are just waiting for someone interested to step up and do some work.
I've lost count of the number of times I've read a comment on the AUR to the effect of "You need to change <setting x> to <value y>, or the package won't build," only to see the maintainer hasn't acted upon that change after a reasonable grace period.  The package isn't marked as orphaned, and may not be flagged out-of-date, but it's effectively both. In my opinion, while an immediate wipe of everything may be a little too drastic, summarily doing away with anything that's been orphaned more than 6 months, resetting all AUR votes to zero, taking stock of things in [community] and making it clear that things will be done away with several months from now (and everything will need to be uploaded again) is reasonable. I'm not going to pretend to have any details in my head about how to proceed, but the sheer number of abandoned packages is staggering; start by just getting rid of them.
Also, in my totally non-authoritative opinion, there are certain packages in the AUR that the TUs might consider placing on some sort of probationary status, or even getting rid of, because they just don't seem (to me) to need the Arch Build System for any good reason, and so don't seem (to me) to belong in the AUR. I'm talking about toolkit and window manager themes, window manager plugins (think XMonad contrib) and variants (think DWM Sprinkles), Vim plugins and colorschemes, minor EMACS modes, Ruby gems, Python pip/easy_install packages, fonts---PKGBUILDs that are essentially overblown download-and-move-this-file scripts or calls to other operations (e.g. "gem install") rather than source build scripts, or which don't need to be installed to the root filesystem on single-user systems(and most of us probably have single-user systesms).