There are three kinds of orphans in AUR at the moment. 1) A sea of packages that have either become obselete or have been added in some other package. ( Like dolphin ).
2) The others are ruby/python/perl libraries. The problem with these is that installing them using pyPI or gems is quite simple (though not highly recommended). So many of these get orphaned 3) The last category is where maintainers do not have the time to do justice to their packages and hence orphan it. I found I had a little free time and could adopt some packages. I found myself in this sea. It would be good if we can start a wiki page where every "useful" package that is currently orphaned can be added and removed once adopted. I checked out the wiki. The AUR cleanup day is the closest I got to. We would need something like an inverse of that now. So any user who wants to adopt a package should go to the page, choose whatever he wants to adopt and remove it from the page. I feel this will clear up a lot of packages in the second and last categories. Also, we can give a guideline for people who disown packages to add it to the corresponding page (obselete/required) in the hope that someone will take over the package --- Ashok `ScriptDevil` Gautham