Consider forking archive-rpm

[nbarrientos]

https://github.com/legoscia/archive-rpm

This useful package is broken in Emacs 28:

• Doesn't work with modern emacs legoscia/archive-rpm#1

The maintainer seems unresponsive to patches:

• Add support for zstd compression format. legoscia/archive-rpm#2
• Encapsulate file summaries and descriptions into structs legoscia/archive-rpm#3

The license is GPLv3 and it's distributed via MELPA:

https://github.com/melpa/melpa/blob/master/recipes/archive-rpm

Maybe a good idea to fork it, merge the pending fixes and ask for origin change in MELPA before Emacs 28 is out.

[tarsius]

Sure but someone(tm) has to do it and its also important to do everything to get the original author on board.

I would recommend trying to contact him by mail. If that doesn't work then maybe forking is the right thing to do, but someone would have to become the new maintainer. Would you be willing to do that, iff it comes to that?

(For a while I/we included more packages in the orphanage but are moving away from that again--there are just too many packages that would need some more loving, so I try to reserve the orphanage for "important" packages again, i.e., packages that have many users and/or other packages depend on.)

[tarsius]

There is also the more lightweight approach of merely "patching" the package, instead of forking it to the orphanage or elsewhere. The way that works is that the mirroring tool uses rebase to update a package (instead of pull --ff-only). This is somewhat similar to what linux distributions do. Melpa could then import from the mirror, while we wait for upstream to act.

This also isn't something I want to do on large scale. It is currently being done for 16 out of the ~8000 packages in the mirror.

[nbarrientos]

Ok, thanks. Along the same lines and just in case somebody ends up here looking for a working version of the package for Emacs 28 and beyond, my personal fork has all the pending patches merged.

[nbarrientos]

Thanks. I'll mail the maintainer as a first step. Later on we can decide together on how to proceed. If you don't consider the impact of the package big enough to fork it here (if that's the outcome, of course) I'm happy to take over the maintenance in my own space. I'll come back with any update.

[nbarrientos]

Maintainer pinged via e-mail.

[nbarrientos]

No reply :/

[tarsius]

Okay then you should open a pull-request in the Melpa repository after reading https://github.com/melpa/melpa/wiki/Unmaintained-Packages-and-Forks. Mention this discussion there.

[nbarrientos]

Thanks.

"Unresponsive" is a bit subjective, but from our perspective an adequate attempt to contact the author is a couple emails, one to two weeks apart, and no reply for a month. Yes it's a long time, but again we want to respect the original author's time and their original contribution to the package.

I'll then ping again via e-mail today and wait for 15 days more.