On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 20:23, Steve Holmes <steve.holmes88@gmail.com>wrote:
Yeah, when I got started into learning package maintenance in Arch, I recall reading the wiki pages for AUR and ABS (the Arch Build System). Sorry, I forget the exact links but the ABS stuff explains PKGBUILDs really well and when I combined that with the AUR material, I felt I was pretty will informed to start digging in and start playing around with some PKGBUILDs I was interested in and then I took on a couple packages that I was personally interested in maintaining. I also have download some other packages that are only in AUR and I built them on my own system in a /var/abs/local path so that also gave me more self learned experience with packages and how these things should be built. Probably the area needing most attention paid to is the standards that should be followed when building new PKGBUILDs. Of course, like most of us programmers tend to do, we can just copy other PKGBUILDS and work from them; just hope they are well behaved or we would be creating more bad packages from other bad ones <smile>. But then there's the .proto PKGBUILDs and install scripts that come with the ABS package (if I remember right) that are good starters too.
Anyway, I rambled on here for a long time and probably caused even more confusion but hopefully, this was of some value.
Like Steve, I used the same method of learning about PKGBUILDS, ABS, and the AUR. One thing which made me determined to figure it out, without additional help, was the possibility of responses similar to what David seems to incur. Because there are times when my dementia (this is not a joke) keeps me from finding answers that are right in front of my face and I just can't put it all together. One question to ask one's self comes from this premise; I'm a busy developer or programmer and I don't like all the BS on my mailing list so I'm going to ride hard on someone who asks what I think are silly questions when they could find out for themselves. The flip side is, when you have a question about a legal problem will you spend hours researching it, or call a lawyer. What if the lawyer tells you to read the wiki, STFW, or RTFM. Since lawyers tend to be fairly busy in today's world, or so it seems, maybe he feels he can get a quick hint, get back to work, then have some context to work with when he does his research later. Another analogy would be when you've got a fever of 103 deg F (39.4 deg C) and the doctor tells you to take 2 aspirin, hands you a medical journal to read, and see if you can reach me in the morning. I agree useless noise on the mailing list is aggravating. What's more aggravating is after several responses (positive or negative) a 20 - now 21- barrage of responses. Many of which just continue to elicit responses which are nothing but some form of regurgitation of what's gone before. As a suggestion for those of you who don't care for David's question, don't open his posts and read them. It might make for a more civil world. I also have a short quick fuse and tend to put out responses to attacks as a personal affront. I'll break my machine and have to reinstall the whole system before I ask a question about how to fix anything, even if it's cutting my nose off to spite my face. One would hope this is enough to end the BS, it's getting tiring. Myra Nelson -- Life's fun when your sick and psychotic!