Let me prefix this by saying that I know the developers have lots of things to do (including "real-life" stuff) and I am not intending to offend anyone by this idea - especially the maintainer of the eclipse package which I am going to use as an example. Also this may be a really bad idea! :)
I have noticed over the years that every so often a package in the main repos stagnates. That is, it does not get updated for a while after a newer version is available. Now Arch users tend to like new shiny things... so when this happens a number of updated PKGBUILDs appear on the forums and (worse?) subtly renamed packages appear in AUR. This has happened with eclipse & eclipse-cdt. Eclipse has not been updated to version 3.3 in the months since it was released. So now in AUR there is "eclipse-bin" and "eclipse-cdt4". While eclipse-bin is technically a "different package" (just binary version from website), eclipse-cdt4 is just the natural upgrade from eclipse-cdt in extra. My strong suspicion is that neither of these packages would have appeared in AUR if they were updated in extra and they will sit there without a maintainer (and never be used) once the update of the package in extra occurs. A possible solution would be to have a website where users could submit a PKGBUILD for a package needing updated in the main repos. Then this PKGBUILD could be taken by a developer, reviewed and added to the main repositories. This may be useful for packages with no maintainer (although I realize you are trying to clear those from the repos) and relieve some of the pressure on developers in maintaining the non-essential packages. This page with the submitted PKGBUILDs would need to be viewable publicly so people could see what has been submitted and update things themselves - so it would sort of be an AUR for the packages in the main repo. Again, I realize that Arch has a relatively small development team and know about limited time, but using the community this way could help maintain the rolling release ideal of having the latest stable package available. To put some (possibly meaningless) numbers on this idea, currently there are 171 packages flagged as out of date (~6.5%). Regards, Allan _______________________________________________ arch mailing list arch@archlinux.org http://archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
