Re: [ELPA] Package cleanup

[Jimmy Aguilar Mena]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2022 at 11:12:06PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
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>
> Thanks for investigating the situation with unmaintained packages.
> What you've found will help us think about what to do.
>
>  > Just a question. Did you finally agreed about the package
>  > obsoletion/removal procedure for ELPA?
>
> I'd like to see a proposal.
I have seen some discussions about this topic before. See bellow.

>  > It seems there are some packages there which haven't received any update
>  > in a very long time (>5 years).
>
> That suggests they might have bugs and need maintenance,
> but it does not imply they are useless or obsolete.
> They might be obsolete, or not.
>
> There are many questions we'd want to check
> to decide what to do with each package.
But if they don't receive any update for years, and the bug reports
accumulate (on github too) then it quite possible that either the users
and the maintainers are not interested on it anymore.

>  > I have found some packages that doesn't even work or rely on some
>  > features that were obsoleted or removed.
>
> In those cases, we clearly don't want to leave the package there
> in its current form.  But what change should we make?
>
> We could delete it.  We could look for people to update it.
> Either one might be better, depending on more details.
We could archive it in a different repository in case someone desires to
adopt, check or fork in the future. Or we could also flag it somehow to
say to the package-list that it is orphan, obsolete,
unmaintained... That's the approach in the AUR repository for arch Linux
and it is useful; because the users get a warning during the updates
about abandon, orphan or outdated packages.

Then if a package is in that state for too long it may be archived, so
it can be accessed, but is not offered in the package list as a good
alternative.
> --
> Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)