Hi Hunter, Hey, that's awesome! This is adding +1 statistic that choosing a modern language for aurweb is be beneficial for others to more easily develop with and contribute to. That was the goal from the start! As far as contributions go: Yes, we are absolutely welcoming to any person who is interested and/or wishes to help out! There's a GitLab issue here which is tracking the overall port state of the project: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/aurweb/-/issues/18 Additionally, we put together this simple wiki page at https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/aurweb/-/wikis/Python-Port which explains a bit in more detail what's going on. It definitely needs updating, but this does contain most of the contribution guidelines we've come to assert for the Python/FastAPI port. See https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/aurweb/-/wikis/Python-Port#who-where if you would like to chat with anyone, we're always lurking in that IRC channel. We could also come up with tasks for you through IRC. If you do not prefer to use IRC, let us know; I can definitely put together a prime list of good-to-do tasks and send them over to you via email. In short: What we've got left to do is implement all of the package actions, packages search page and the /rpc API (rpc already has a portion done). After we finish the port, we'll have some rigorous adding of more tests and tons of tests to do to make absolute sure that Python is at the state we want it at (basically a mimic of PHP's UI/API with improvements where simple and sensible). After that, we'll finally be able to remove the PHP codebase from the repository completely and swap everything over to using Python/FastAPI. Without any more specifics; some of the tasks we need to get done quite soon would be most of the pkg*.php portings (pkgdel.php, pkgflag.php, etc). Those tasks are blocked however behind https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/aurweb/-/merge_requests/115 which will be merged in quite soon. We're also looking to add an alembic migration which adds full text search to columns which we search via `LIKE`. This will speed up server performance massively. This could be done for both PHP and Python, in fact: see `aurweb/schema.py` and `migrations/`. It does get a bit tricky though because we support both `mysql` and `sqlite`, so the alembic migrations generally require more complex than normal code to deal with sqlite. Anyway, this is all good news for us, and we're happy you're interested (and additionally carrying it over to your own fork for Debian, MPR!). We'd like to do the best we can to provide you with any answers to questions or tools you may need. Please keep in touch! P.S. Timeline-wise, I previously set an optimistic deadline for the project, but we've definitely not hit that. That being said, the state we're at right now tells me that we've got about 1-2 months left of pure development before the pure testing and test improvements stage begins. Regards, Kevin On Wed, Jul 21, 2021 at 10:36:09AM -0500, Hunter Wittenborn via aur-dev wrote:

Hi!

That honestly does change how I'd like to do everything in the future. I'm much more familiar with Python than PHP, and being and to do things in Python would make things significantly easier on my end (in which case I'd be fine holding off for quite a bit).

...

we are most likely going to be major version bumping the project when the Python/FastAPI port is complete

Is this something you (or anyone else on the aurweb team) would be looking for help with? I wouldn't say I'm the most strongest person with Python (I start hacking with using it just a couple weeks ago), but I have (I think) caught on relatively quickly [1] for the short burst of time I've been using it.

If I were to start contributing, is there anywhere I could start? I'm thinking most of the changes would be in the 'web' folder (I saw most of the PHP files were there), but I was curious if anything might've been wanting to get done first or anything like that.

...

Is there a location of the "MPR" source I can look through? I'd like to check out how you're modeling your code off of what's in aurweb so I can help better.

You can find the current source for the MPR in the footer of this email [2]. Ignore the notes in the README about mprweb perodically using releases of aurweb though, as that was the plan before I was thinking about making any heavier changes to the platform.

[1]: https://github.com/hwittenborn/tap

[2]: https://github.com/makedeb/mprweb

---- On Tue, 20 Jul 2021 15:40:48 -0500 Kevin Morris via aur-dev wrote ----

Hello Hunter,

I'd like to fill you in on some development details of aurweb that may come in particularly useful for you to know, especially since you are developing a fork of it.

The `live` branch and the `master` branch are diverged a bit. The aurweb project has decided in the past to use `live` as its production branch, and things are carefully cherry-picked in there from `master` when we need to apply a fix that resides in master.

That being said, `master` also now contains commits that are not in live.

Now, as far as a release goes to sync up master and live together:

We are in the process of porting aurweb's PHP implementation over to Python/FastAPI, of which commits reside in the `pu` branch of aurweb. As far as `live` currently goes; we are not planning to be making any changes to live as it stands unless a bug is addressed in there or we're moving onto a new release version (which typically involves changes in our implementation or bugfixesi in master).

Now, there was discussion had about possibly releasing a version bump because we've got some fixes in master now that fix some issues in the 5.0.0 release. We could definitely put a new release together with current `master`, but the relationship between `master` and `live` will remain.

So, as you develop, please do not depend on aur.archlinux.org to be the production state of the `master` branch. Instead, host an instance of yours locally and check things in there.

All that being said; please do keep in mind that we are most likely going to be major version bumping the project when the Python/FastAPI port is complete, and that is going to change the entire codebase in `master`, aside from some Python scripts that we don't need to modify.

Is there a location of the "MPR" source I can look through? I'd like to check out how you're modeling your code off of what's in aurweb so I can help better.

Regards, Kevin

On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 10:28:56AM -0500, Hunter Wittenborn via aur-dev wrote:

...

This email is in reference to an issue on the Arch Linux bugtracker: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/71427

---

I'm currently working on a platform known as the MPR [1], which is quite literally the AUR, just designed for Debian-based distributions. The whole idea of the project builds upon makedeb [2], which actually uses makepkg, and does some conversion stuff on top to make the package work properly with APT.

Getting back to the MPR then - I was wondering if it would be possible to get a new release published. The current 5.0.0 release has some bugs that aren't present in the live version, and it's requiring me (as stated in the issue on the bugtracker itself) to try to triage these bugs manually (which isn't too much of a problem, but for the reason mentioned next, it would be easiest if I could just get a new release with all the fixes incorporated).

The MPR is currently running off of mprweb [3], which (at this point) is pretty much just aurweb with a reskin.

I'm wanting to start make some more heavy modifications to the platform though, such as adding some things to the RPC JSON interface (mostly for things mentioned in makedeb's docs [4]), and possibly doing some things with the GUI. At current, the goal is to get a release of aurweb, and then just fork it and go from there. I wouldn't be using any new releases of aurweb at that point, and would just keep adding in features as I go along.

If I were to make any changes that would be deemable to be contributed back to aurweb, I'd be more than glad to do so as well. I'm just wanting to, before I start any (objectionably) bigger modifications, be able to use something that's at least somewhat close to aurweb's current state.

I'm not asking for anything immediately, I'm just, again, wanting something where I can have a starting point where these known bugs are just polished out.

[1]: https://mpr.hunterwittenborn.com/

[2]: https://github.com/makedeb/makedeb

[3]: https://github.com/makedeb/mprweb

[4]: https://docs.hunterwittenborn.com/makedeb/makedeb/additional-pkgbuild-specs

---

Hunter Wittenborn

https://www.hunterwittenborn.com

https://github.com/hwittenborn

-- Kevin Morris Software Developer

Identities: - kevr @ Libera

---

Hunter Wittenborn

https://www.hunterwittenborn.com

https://github.com/hwittenborn

-- Kevin Morris Software Developer Identities: - kevr @ Libera