On Wed, 12 Aug 2015 11:05:08 +0200 Lukas Fleischer <lfleisc...@archlinux.org> wrote: > I consider this a slight abuse of the orphan/disown functionality. > Wikipedia defines orphan as > > [...] a child whose parents are dead or have abandoned them > permanently. > > In my opinion, orphan packages should be defined analogously: Packages > which have been abandoned permanently by their former maintainers. I > didn't know that some people used package disowning the way you > described it. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
If you want to keep to your orphan analogy, think of this more as being a foster parent or running a orphanage. > > Even if we disregard the etymology of the word, I still do not think > that "disown but keep maintaining" is a good idea. It makes it quite > hard to distinguish between "real" orphans and "maintained" orphans. > Also, the maintainer information is the first point of contact when > issues with the package arise. Hiding it like that doesn't seem like a > good idea. So maybe we need to improve the way changing maintainership > works. Having a "Give up for adoption" button (that keeps the current > maintainer while allowing anybody to adopt the package) in addition to > "Disown" is one possibility. I am open to other suggestions. This could work, but only if AUR helpers support it. I would image this is a very common mechanism for people to find out that a package they use is an orphan and adopt it. > > Maybe you could at least add yourself as a co-maintainer for now. Or if > you are really *actively* trying to find new maintainers, it probably > wouldn't hurt if you were listed as a maintainer until you find > somebody. Many of the packages I orphaned while searching for a maintainer were picked up by someone I never had contact with. I have only been successful in my active search in a few cases, even though I had a couple of people express interest in picking them up before I orphaned them :(. As others have said, orphaning is currently the best way to find a new maintainer. > > By the way: Yes, "orphan" packages in the official repositories are > deleted from time to time. We have so-called Midyear Cleanups and > Christmas Cleanup where exactly that is done (although I think we didn't > have them for a while for some reason)... Sure it does happen, but they are not deleted after a few weeks as a matter of course. My point is simply that assuming an orphan is broken and useless is premature, same as orphans in the binary repos. Doug