[aur-dev] Some notes on AUR 4.0.0
Hi, As Florian already mentioned in another email, I am away until June 1st. I am on a roaming data plan, so I won't be able to reply to all the feedback and questions on the new AUR until then. I hope that I am going to address at least some of the concerns and questions here, though. For the granularity of the Git repositories, having one repository per package (i.e. package base) is a natural choice. The other possibility is to use one single large repository with branches for each package. Florian told me about gitnamespaces, which allows for combining the advantages from both approaches, and I am going to check whether we can easily use it for the AUR when I am back home. Using one repository per maintainer, however, is extremely inconvenient and leads to unnecessary clutter when changing ownership. One of our main objectives is to have full history of all packages and this means that we would need to perform quite cumbersome history import/export operations whenever a package is disowned or adopted. Also, I am not aware of any disadvantages of the "one repository per package" approach apart from merges being inconvenient (which happen much less frequent than package adoptions, however) and the spurious "I don't like many Git repositories." argument. As Florian said, using gitnamespaces will probably lead to better storage efficiency and I am fine with increasing the blob size limit to 250kiB. As described in the notification draft I sent to aur-dev and aur-general on Saturday, packages can only be resubmitted to aur4.archlinux.org by their current AUR maintainer (on aur.archlinux.org) for 4 weeks. That means that it is *not* possible for user2 to submit the package foobar to aur4.archlinux.org if it is maintained by user1 on aur.archlinux.org for that period of time. It *is* possible however, to submit that package if user1 chose not to resubmit foobar until July 8th. The period of 4 + 4 weeks is a tradeoff: Making that period shorter means that users might not have enough time to resubmit their packages, making that period longer means that the maintenance burden of having to update all packages twice is higher. Please also keep in mind that the AUR should be thought of as a place where the community shares packages on a voluntary basis. You maintain AUR packages because you want to share them, not because you want to own them. "Losing" a package to another maintainer isn't the same thing as losing property. If you have any useful tools or scripts to help with the migration process, please feel free to add them to the aur4.archlinux.org section on the wiki. Regards, Lukas
On Tue, 26 May 2015 at 13:33:58, Lukas Fleischer wrote:
Hi,
As Florian already mentioned in another email, I am away until June 1st. I am on a roaming data plan, so I won't be able to reply to all the feedback and questions on the new AUR until then. I hope that I am going to address at least some of the concerns and questions here, though. [...]
Another thing I forgot: I am going to fully reset the aur4.archlinux.org database on June 8th. This means that all package bases, accounts and comments added so for will be deleted. If you already imported your packages, don't panic: You can use a one-liner like $ for pkg in *; do ( cd "$pkg" && git push ); done to resubmit everything. Regards, Lukas
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Lukas Fleischer