[arch-general] Out dated packages in extra - What to do ?

[Jan de Groot]

On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 11:12 +0200, Mathieu Clabaut wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
>  what is the policy for extra out-of-date packages.
>  I'm thinking about eclipse and antlr....
>  The first one gave birth to its AUR up to date counterpart :
> eclipse-bin,
>  and I've got an antlr3 package at hand, but I do not want to make it
> in AUR without knowing if it is good practice.
> 
>  Those package are flagged as out-of-date.
>  The bts policy is to not open bug for such a request, so as a last
> resort, I send this mail...
> 
>  There was already some discussion about this problem in the end of
> 2007; see http://readlist.com/lists/archlinux.org/arch/1/6979.html
> 
>  Thank you for any tip.
> 
>  PS. I've seen at least one user leaving arch because of such
> out-dated packages.... (In french :
> http://linuxfr.org/~chicha/26802.html)

As for antlr3: yes, I know it's outdated. The reason why we keep it at
2.x is that 2.x works fine for the packages in our repository that
depend on it, and that I haven't had a chance to make a good build for
antlr3 from source (it simply won't build).
You can place antlr3 in AUR if you like, as long as it is backwards
compatible with antlr from extra, it may provide the package, otherwise
you should make sure it's not conflicting.