Hi list,

The next major AUR release will come with Git integration. In this email, I am going to summarize previous ideas and make things a bit more concrete (sketch implementation details etc.)

If you are new to this topic, please read [1] and [2] first.

Our plan is to create one Git repository per package base. Each of the Git repositories contains a PKGBUILD and zero or more additionally required files, so you will no longer need to build a source tarball. There will be a pkgbuild-introspection utility to generate and write .AURINFO metadata without automatically putting that file inside the tarball. Florian had the idea to use a shared Git object database for space efficiency.

When creating a new account, users will be able to upload an SSH public key. This key will be stored in the AUR database and can also be changed using the profile edit page. Using this public key, users will be able to push to repositories they maintain using Git over SSH. For authentication, a custom script doing a lookup in the AUR user database will be used as AuthorizedKeysCommand. If a matching key is found, that script prints the corresponding authorized_keys line with a forced command that invokes a wrapper around the Git shell. That wrapper in turn does authorization by checking maintainership and then calls git-shell(1).

Using Git hooks, the .AURINFO metadata of a package is parsed when pushing and the AUR package database is updated accordingly. Hooks will also take care of checking the tree objects for huge files etc. The receive.denyNonFastForwards configuration option will be enabled to prevent users from rewriting the history.

In order to submit new packages, you will be able to generate empty Git repositories via the AUR web interface. During the transition period, all existing source tarballs will be converted to bare repositories with one initial commit whose tree equals the tarball contents. As has been suggested in either [1] or [2] thread, can we get initial importing of git history? I personally haven't been using the same scheme for version control, but from what I've read it's quite simple to separate a directory into its own repository, maintaining the commit history. It would be really nice to have, to be able to fully migrate off of personal solutions without losing anything.

Instead of the source tarball download link and the PKGBUILD preview, there will be a public clone URL on the package details page. In a second step, cgit will be configured to provide a web-based interface to all the repositories. Then, links to tarball snapshots and to the PKGBUILD preview will be added to the details page as a replacement for the "Download tarball" and "View PKGBUILD" links (all this is supposed to happen before the first release).

As soon as all this is set up, we can add support for multiple maintainers and related features.

If there are any questions or suggestions regarding this setup, please feel free to ask/reply.

Regards, Lukas

[1] https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-dev/2013-March/002411.html [2] https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-dev/2014-January/002592.html

Cheers Kuba