FS#72941 - [pacmatic] 20150126-3 News download fails; upstream project unmaintained/abandoned?

Attached to Project: Community Packages
Opened by Eric Langlois (elanglois) - Monday, 06 December 2021, 20:13 GMT
Last edited by Orhun Parmaksız (orhun) - Thursday, 16 March 2023, 16:36 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages
Status Closed
Assigned To Orhun Parmaksız (orhun)
Architecture All
Severity Medium
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 1
Private No

Details

Description:
Pacmatic attempts to download the arch news feed from "https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/" but this URL has been moved to "https://archlinux.org/feeds/news/" so the download silently fails.
The script needs to be updated to the new URL (remove .www) and/or pass the `-L` flag to curl to follow redirects.

The corresponding upstream issue (https://github.com/keenerd/pacmatic/issues/41) is 10 months old with no reply from the author. The code has not been updated since 2016 so it might be abandoned at this point.

It is also not clear to me that pacmatic is even open source. I cannot find any open source license distributed with the code. The only suggestion of a license is in the pacman package metadata, which labels it as GPL, but I cannot find the basis for that labelling. I searched the github repo [1], the installed package files (`pacman -Ql pacmatic`) and the author's webpage for the package [2].

[1]: https://github.com/keenerd/pacmatic
[2]: http://kmkeen.com/pacmatic/

Additional info:
* package version: 20150126-3
* Broken link bug report: https://github.com/keenerd/pacmatic/issues/41
* License bug report: https://github.com/keenerd/pacmatic/issues/44

Steps to reproduce:
On a fresh install (or remove /var/log/arch-news.log if it exists), run `pacmatic -Syu`. The script will warn about a "flood of news" but nothing is produced. The news download silently fails and /var/log/arch-news.log is not created. Subsequent runs continue to warn about a "flood of news".
This task depends upon

Closed by  Orhun Parmaksız (orhun)
Thursday, 16 March 2023, 16:36 GMT
Reason for closing:  Won't fix
Additional comments about closing:  package has been dropped to the AUR
Comment by Eric Langlois (elanglois) - Monday, 06 December 2021, 20:30 GMT
Possibly this arch package has been abandoned as well? The maintainer looks to be the same as the upstream author and an issue report for a dependency update has been open since 2018: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/58766

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