[arch-dev-public] [extra] orphans

[keenerd]

Hello devs!

Thank you Florian for trying this out.  I do hope that we won't foul
up the S/N ratio too much.

One of the big reasons for letting TUs post here was so that we would
have a place to formally/officially ask to have packages moved from
[extra] to [community].  Previously this went through side channels
such as private email.  I know some TUs will be asking for specific
packages in the next few days, but I just wanted to kick things off by
posting a list of all of them.  You can see it here:

http://kmkeen.com/tmp/extra-to-community

Now this is a mechanically generated list.  Of the 340 orphans in
[extra], it picks out the 200 that could be (in theory) safely moved
to [community].  That is, nothing in [extra] depends on these
packages.  The script is not smart enough to deal with optdeps, but we
are generally pretty lax about those anyway.  Details below about how
to make the list.

I am not asking for all of these to be moved, and I am certainly not
asking to maintain all 200 of them myself.  Just saying that there are
a lot that would appreciate some love.

What I will ask the devs to do is to see if there are any they'd like
to hold on to themselves.  You can do this by install aurphan and
running

aurphan -p | grep 'Extr'

The -p mode was requested by Pierre.  It will look at the packages you
have installed and of those will pick out the ones with no maintainer.
 Since these will all be packages you use, hopefully they may be ones
you have an interest in maintaining.

As a side note, there seems to be an unofficial policy among the devs
to randomly pick up flagged orphans packages in [extra] and fix them.
This is very good!  But these packages are never adopted.  This is
very confusing.  It does seem a little odd that the people who build
the version bump just don't adopt the package.  Is there some detail
that I am missing?


-Kyle
http://kmkeen.com


Appendix A

How to generate the big list of orphans:

sed -i 's/pacman -Qq/pacman -Ssq/' aurphan
./aurphan | grep 'Extr' | grep '(mobile)' | cut -f 2