[Bro-Dev] Package manager meta data

[Jan Grashöfer]

>> Thanks for the clarification. Automatic removal might be a bit
>> aggressive but a warning would be very helpful I guess.
> 
> From the user’s perspective, if they already installed a package that later becomes unavailable, they’d see a warning when they do “refresh”, but otherwise they could continue using the installed package.
> 
> But within the package source, what reason is there to keep old packages listed if their git URL no longer points to a valid package?  What would a user do with that information?  Theoretically, if the package was just temporarily unavailable, the next time the aggregation process runs, it would get listed again and users can seamlessly start receiving updates for it again.

I wasn't precise, sorry. I thought of an temporary unavailable package
repository and had in mind that it would be deleted from the upstream
package source repository by a cron job. I guess you are talking about a
local copy of that source repo. In that case deleting unavailable
packages wouldn't harm. I thought about supporting the operator of the
upstream source repository in cleaning the repo. However, this will
require manual interaction anyway and hopefully isn't a use case that
will be encountered soon :)

Best regards,
Jan