Arch Linux

An example from Debian from which BMP has been removed in 2007:
http://packages.qa.debian.org/b/beep-media-player/news/20070803T223907Z.html

Since nobody maintains it and nothing critical depends on it, BMP should be automatically moved to the AUR during the next [extra] purge. Those happen randomly once a year or so. If there were issues with BMP (e.g. it is blocking the rebuild for some library it depends on), this would have already been done; but there isn't, so where's the harm? Also, Debian is no example. :P

"Since nobody maintains it and nothing critical depends on it, BMP should be automatically moved to the AUR during the next [extra] purge. Those happen randomly once a year or so."

Sorry in advance for offtopic comments below; i want to state that im not bitching about this, but here goes:
I understand all of the above but what you say is not exactly accurate.
Some days ago Andrea removed skanlite from extra [1] , Sergej bind-geodns from community [2] and Allan gpodder2 [3] from community without notifying the people who use these applications.

When i emailed Andrea asking why skanlite had been removed from the repos out of the blue, he told me that it had been an orphan for months so he removed it.
This behaviour is irresponsible, annoying and inconsistent to what you claim above.

Naturally its the distribution developers the ones who decide what stays in the repos and what does not, but IMO this behaviour should change. This kind of behaviour might even lead to a broken system and security issues without it being the users fault.

If you want to do scheduled cleanups every now and then, fine; just dont do cleanups all the time without letting anyone know.
Inform the user as much as possible about changes.


[1]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=63064
[2]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=63357
[3]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=63236

PS. OK, Allan sort of announced it by saying in the IRC that he's gonna skip taking part in the python 3.3 rebuild. By dropping gpodder2 and one of its dependencies to the AUR...if one considers that an announcement.

"Naturally its the distribution developers the ones who decide what stays in the repos and what does not, but IMO this behaviour should change."

So instead of developers developing the distro we should have... nobody developing the distro? Makes perfect sense. And let me reiterate what has been said countless times: anybody who has some competence with Arch, cares about it, and happens to have some time to contribute to it, is always free to apply to be a trusted user in order to become part of what you seem to regard as an elite persecuting users - because developers are users too!

"This kind of behaviour might even lead to a broken system and security issues without it being the users fault."

Just as walking down the street might lead to sudden death. Now, if nobody (including users) reports any issue with a piece of software, maintained or not, it is assumed to be fine. Be sure to let us know when you find that BMP breaks your system or opens wide security cracks in it. Until then, you're just talking.

I will grant you that package additions/removals should be announced on arch-dev-public. In fact, if you only had given me one good reason for BMP to be removed from the repos, I would have done it. But instead you chose to rant and that's just not nearly as effective as a reasonable argument.