bug#62893: 30.0.50; ELPA recipes with broken :url property values

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

No Wayman <iarchivedmywholelife@gmail.com> writes:

> In elpa-packages, is there a reason why we keep the :url property for
> packages for which
> the upstream no longer exists? e.g. any package :url pointing to
> "http://www.dr-quibit.org/git/predictive.git"?
>
> I ask because I'm writing GNU/NonGNU ELPA support for Elpaca.
> I'd like to avoid hard-coding an exception for that URL when
> generating package recipes.
> Would a patch changing those :url values to nil be accepted?
> If so, should the old URL be preserved in a comment above each
> package?

Elpa-admin.el fails with a message from "git fetch", which makes sense
if a repository is temporarily not available.  What I think would make
sense here would be to first check what repositories are failing and
then consider if setting the :url to nil would make sense or if it has
just moved somewhere else.

E.g. in this case it seems that there has been an issue with the hosting
provider, and Toby has been (very) slowly porting his packages over to
Gitlab: https://dr-qubit.org/undo-tree.html#orgffcc37e.