My opinion on this first: I'm not against his intention to clean AUR. I'm against using some self-written scripts to mass-file requests to certain packages just based on t heir traits, like keywords, names, or whatever. I'm also against doing so by hand, which is basically using yourself as a request machine.
I think most of us would agree that every request, no matter they're for orphan, merge, or deletion, need to be thought carefully and sent with details associated close ly with it. And blindly filing them just adds burden to PMs as this leaves research to be done to PMs. The direct reason I want to post this is reading following requests: PRQ#51267[1], PRQ#51269[2], PRQ#51270[3] and PRQ#51271[4], these affects armcl-opencl[5], arm-linux -gnueabihf-armcl-neon[6], aarch64-linux-gnu-armcl-opencl+neon[7] and aarch64-linux-gnu-armcl-neon[8] accordingly. If you take a look at the packages, you could clearly see they're for cross-compiling on an x86_64 ArchLinux host to an ARM target. These are just like aarch64-linux-gn u-gcc, arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc, etc in the official repos, and they have useful functionality like opencl and neon support. But how did MarsSeed write his deletion requests? Each of them are simply just the following message copy and pasted, and there're more, tens of, if not hundreds of oth er requests with pasted detail same as them: > ARM-only packages belong to ArchLinuxARM.org repos, not AUR: > > https://archlinuxarm.org/packages > > https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2675 > https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=4 > > AUR is primarily for Arch Linux, so packages here must work with the > x86_64 architecture: > https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_package_guidelines#Architectures I think we could say these requests are clearly filed by some automated process that's triggered on any package with arm or aarch64 keywords. But the process catches wr ong targets and these requests would result in either wrongly deleted packages or increased labor for PMs to read the PKGBUILDs by themselves before rejecting them. This is not right. This, an automated request filing process, should not be the way a user files their package requests. If an automated process just catches all packag es with some traits and filing requests is acceptable, then why is a user needed in the process at all? The user account is just like an API key for a bot program in that case. And if doing so is acceptable, why not just give the script or whatever tech behind the automated process to PMs so they can even save the time needed to check requests list? Still, I appreciate the amount of time MarsSeed put previously on clearing the AUR. I think there might be ~10k requests filed by him ever since he joined AUR (based on a simple search of 'MarsSeed [1]' in the aur-requests mailing list), and I'd like to see him continuing on his work, but not in such robotic way.
