August 2017 - Arch-dev-public - lists.archlinux.org

[arch-dev-public] Improving overall experience for contributors
by Bartłomiej Piotrowski 06 Feb '19

06 Feb '19

Hi all, Spending some time outside the regular Arch circles, I realized that the way we "outreach" potential contributors is at least imperfect. One of the problems I keep hearing about is that there is no clear place where potential contributors could start. Sure, some things seem obvious to us: take care of some wiki article or adopt orphan AUR packages. It isn't actually that easy. Not everyone is interested in editing or maintaining random packages, and while there is plenty to do, how someone new could know it? We could use help not only with existing projects like archweb, pyalpm or namcap, but also with development of new code (for example a maintainable rebuild automation) and infrastructure side (which is in fact too generic term that could be better described). I am totally in love with What can I do for Mozilla?[1] which is open source, so why not steal this wonderful idea? But it also means we need a way to communicate with people interested in helping us: at least an IRC channel and new mailing list. Another thing that I heard in last few months isthat it is actually hard for potential TU candidates to find a sponsor. While I believe it is perfectly fine to e-mail few potential sponsors to ask for opinion, throwing random messages at people doesn't sound really appealing. In my humble opinion, we should rethink the way we recruit people and probably introduce fine-grained permissions to dbscripts that would allow to limit new maintainers to limited set of packages. We should also lower our expectations towards candidates. At least once we rejected one for some stupid reason (no fingerpointing here, I'm not saint either), leaving packages they wanted to adopt virtually orphan. It's better to help amn inexperienced packager gain experience than voting no, really; to be brutally honest, quite a lot of packaging work we are handling doesn't have much in common with rocket science. I also wanted to touch mailing lists vs GitHub vs Gitlab topic but we will tackle it another time. Your thoughts? Bartłomiej [1] https://whatcanidoformozilla.org/

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[arch-dev-public] Responsive views for Forums and Wiki
by Pierre Schmitz 30 Aug '17

30 Aug '17

Hi, for the last few days I had been working on a more mobile friendly view of our Wikis and Forums. These have just been deployed. Here is what changed: While it's not perfect on small screens it should at least be way more readable on your mobile phones. Let me know of any issues though. Wiki: * Updated to MediaWiki 1.29.1 * Removed our fork of the MonoBook skin * Introduce a new "ArchLinux" extension which injects some styles and our navigation bar independent of the skin. This was quite a lot of work to figure out, but future updates should be way easier now. * The default skin is Vector; MonoBook is still available and can be enabled in your personal settings * The MobileFrontend extension has been removed (So we have a branded view for mobile as well) * PR see https://github.com/archlinux/archwiki/pull/9/files Forums: * Created a github repo at https://github.com/archlinux/archbbs * PR at https://github.com/archlinux/archbbs/pull/1 * Some docker compose configuration to simplify development (similar to the on in the wiki) In addition to this I have been working on a re-implementation of https://www.archlinux.de. Part of this is a new more mobile friendly design. Especially the navigation which moves the menu entries into a so called Hamburger menu on smaller screens is still missing from the implementation mentioned above. I plan to extract these "somehow" so we can use a common navigation in all our websites. At least a generated snippet we can copy into our projects. Greetings, Pierre

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[arch-dev-public] Away for a few days
by Eli Schwartz 29 Aug '17

29 Aug '17

I'll be traveling tomorrow to a friend's wedding, plus dealing with a move, so chances are I won't be very active for the immediate future. Hopefully we won't be suddenly swarmed with more bugs than Doug can handle. :) -- Eli Schwartz

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[arch-dev-public] Orphaned packages
by Sébastien Luttringer 20 Aug '17

20 Aug '17

Hello, I orphaned several packages I don't use anymore. The following have no more maintainer, so if nobody is interested, I will move them to AUR. - unifi - rxvt-unicode - laptop-detect - python-docutils - quilt - rblcheck Cheers, Sébastien "Seblu" Luttringer

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[arch-dev-public] Drop hfsutils
by Muflone 19 Aug '17

19 Aug '17

Hi The current status of the package hfsutils v332 is really out-of-date compared to Apple sources [1] v589. Various GNU/Linux distributions approach this package in many different ways. - Debian still maintains it the outdated v332 [2] - Fedora uses a more recent version v540 [3] which doesn't provide anymore mkfs.hfs. A package from another source could create new filesystems. - Gentoo uses the same old version v332 [4] As I don't use this package anymore and I don't think a 10 years old package should live in the official repositories I plan to move hfsutils to the AUR. If someone has a better idea or wants to maintain hfsutils please let me know. If not I'll try to update hfsutils in the AUR to v540. [1]: https://opensource.apple.com/source/diskdev_cmds/diskdev_cmds-589/ [2]: https://packages.debian.org/sid/hfsprogs [3]: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/hfsplus-tools/blob/master/f/hfsplus-tool… [4]: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/sys-fs/diskdev_cmds -- Fabio Castelli aka Muflone

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[arch-dev-public] Bug tracker group - New TU
by Dan Printzell 14 Aug '17

14 Aug '17

Hi everyone. I got accepted as a TU about 6 days ago and I still haven't gotten upgraded to the Trusted User group on the bug tracker. My account: https://bugs.archlinux.org/user/25875 Thanks Dan Printzell

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[arch-dev-public] away/unavailable
by Dave Reisner 10 Aug '17

10 Aug '17

Hi, I'm sporadically unavailable for the next month or so: * vacation: 8/11 - 8/20 * work trip: 9/1 - 9/9 * wedding: 9/22 - 9/24 If it's not one of the above, I'm likely doing planning for said wedding and/or contemplating some other fairly major upcoming changes. Feel free to update any/all of my packages as needed. dR

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