[aur-general] Deletion of orphaned packages on AUR4

Hi, There seems to be quite some confusion about the package migration process and about package deletion. I would like to clarify my point of view. Hopefully it serves as a basis for discussion (i.e. technical discussion without attacking anybody personally). As already mentioned a couple of times, cleaning up the AUR was one of the incentives for having users resubmit their packages. This has several advantages: * Working packages: New users are confused when an AUR package does not build. However, packages are often broken because of being outdated or unmaintained. * Less clutter: Working packages are easier to find. Package statistics are not distorted. * Storage: Less space used for packages that do not work. On the AUR server and on mirrors. So please do not upload packages any packages to AUR 4.0.0, unless you are interested in maintaining them. If a package has not been resubmitted to the AUR 4.0.0, the maintainer did not care about it for at least two months. Please either decide to maintain such a package or wait for somebody else willing to do so. Along these lines, it might also make sense to generally delete packages that have been unmaintained for a long time. Maybe have a script to automatically remove packages that have been orphaned for a couple of months. Note that we do keep the Git repositories of deleted packages, so if anybody wants to maintain the package later, he can always clone the repository of the deleted package, fix the package and simply push it afterwards. We are also working on a command to revive deleted packages without having to add a new commit. Package deletion is equivalent to "hiding it from the website", it does not mean that the package and all its Git history are gone. Orphaning a package is a preliminary stage that only tags a package without hiding it. The "missing dependency" argument was brought up a couple of times. If you discover such a case, please contact the maintainer of the package that requires the missing package and ask him to submit it as well. You should only maintain an AUR package if you are using it, so everybody should be interested in maintaining dependencies of their packages as well (unless they are maintained by somebody else already, of course). Regards, Lukas