On 01/07/14 at 12:24am, Lukas Fleischer wrote:
On Mon, 06 Jan 2014 at 23:12:32, Karol Blazewicz wrote:
[...] Some users suggest transforming AUR into a wiki, some would like to use git for pull requests etc., others support an annual wipe i.e. AUR is moved into a read-only state (and moved to aur-old address) and maintainers are asked to resubmit PKGBUILDs - this would keep old comments and votes and over time only the PKGBUILDs that actually are maintained would be kept in the AUR.
What are the thoughts of the AUR overlords about all this? If you give such grassroots effort a NACK, there's no point in the discussion, until further notice.
I am generally open to every suggestion that improves the AUR in any way. However, these ideas need to be discussed either on this mailing list or on the bug tracker (and the mailing list might be a better idea unless you already have a very precise idea of how the improvement looks like).
Some comments on the things you already mentioned:
* Before thinking about migrating to another software, we need to balance pros and cons. A big counterargument to every big change is the need for migration which is often cumbersome. The most popular features of the AUR are the package search, the package details view, and the possibility to download packages (maybe also upload and comments). Does a wiki make these things easier?
* I like the idea of better Git integration. It requires quite some work, though. See FS#23010 [1] for details.
* What is the benefit of an automated removal of all packages? How is removing dozens of packages better than having dozens of packages that do not work but often only need slight changes? Are you rather talking about marking packages, that haven't been touched for a while, as "inactive" and hiding them from search results by default?
Regards, Lukas
I like the Git integration too, but I am unsure how well it work. I like the idea that someone can send a fix to a maintainer in an easy to merge/review method, but I am not sure how easy this can be implemented in AUR. I assume that something like pull requests ala github cost a lot of time to implement. I don't like the idea of removal of all packages, it seems counter-productive and we would loose a lot of history. It will also lead to a cat and mice race between old and new maintainers when they start uploading the same version. Deleting all packages that don't have source code upstream anymore seems to be a better approach if there are too many packages, but that still requires manual intervention. BTW there is an awesome guy on irc who wrote an aurlinter, which checks AUR packages against common mistakes. [1] [1] https://github.com/simonhollingshead/aurlinter -- Jelle van der Waa