April 2024 - Aur-general - lists.archlinux.org

About the intentionally duplicated package wechat-beta-bwrap and wechat-universal and unmaintained orginal package wechat-uos
by Kimiblock Moe 14 Jun '24

14 Jun '24

Hello people, I'm Kimiblock, the maintainer of wechat-uos-bwrap, writing to request Package Maintainer's action to solve the intentionally duplicated package on AUR. WeChat is a closed-source software developed by Tencent which is used by almost all people in China. In March 5, people in #archlinux-cn discovered that there is a testing version available and shortly after, it became a installable package for China's UOS. I've packaged wechat-uos-bwrap in 2024-03-05 23:37 (CST). 2 days after in 2024-03-07 09:18 (CST), AUR account leaeasy submitted wechat-beta-bwrap. If you look at the initial commit <https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=wechat-beta-bwrap&id=76c45…> of wechat-beta-bwrap, it was almost completely copied from wechat-uos-bwrap (other than a different way to extract the .deb), even the .desktop file. The only major thing they changed is wechat.sh, which sanbox function is removed. But wechat-uos-bwrap can read a environment variable "trashAppUnsafe=1" and disable its sandbox function. So I filed a merge request (#PRQ57379) to merge wechat-beta-bwrap <https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/wechat-beta-bwrap/> into wechat-uos-bwrap <https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/wechat-uos-bwrap/>. After that, one of the wechat-beta-bwrap <https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/wechat-beta-bwrap/> maintainer 7Ji <https://aur.archlinux.org/account/7Ji> submitted a new package called wechat-universal-bwrap <https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/wechat-universal-bwrap>, which is also a duplicate package of wechat-uos-bwrap. So, I'm thinking to merge all that duplicate packages and my wechat-uos-bwrap <https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/wechat-uos-bwrap/> into wechat-uos. Sadly, the original Maintainer DuckSoft disappeared (the last message he sent in #archlinux-cn is over 3 years ago). Therefore, I'm requesting Package Maintainers to merge wechat-beta-bwrap <https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/wechat-beta-bwrap/> and wechat-universal-bwrap <https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/wechat-universal-bwrap> and give Maintainer role to previous wechat-uos maintainer, sukanka <https://aur.archlinux.org/account/sukanka> so that this package can be updated. I'll merge wechat-uos-bwrap <https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/wechat-uos-bwrap/> into wechat-uos once sukanka finish updating this package and add the sandbox function. I've contacted sukanka via Matrix and he/she is willing to maintain this package. -- Sincerely, Kimiblock

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Removal of NicoHood as Package Maintainer due to inactivity
by gromit 05 May '24

05 May '24

Hi all, I'd like to start a "Special Removal of an Inactive Package Maintainer"[0] for NicoHood based on prolonged inactivity. NicoHood has not executed any packaging or AUR maintenance duties since 6 Months now, but the mentioned activity is IMO rather an outlier. When I contacted all people who were inactive in votings for a longer period of time[1] (August '23) we heard back[2] from Nico stating that he would still like to help out with Arch but does not have time/capacity due to personal circumstance right now. Since back then then not much seems to have changed: - His last voting[3] was vote nr. 140 (ended 2022-09-11), since then 11 other votings were done. - His packaging activity was limited to 3 days in the last year[4] - He did not do any AUR Moderation for that timeframe (to my knowledge) Therefore I'm requesting him to be removed as a Package Maintainer. This is not done because I want to cause any harm but rather since I think it reflects the status quo. If at some later point he has the time / resources to help out again I'm very much in favour of welcoming him back. The discussion period will last for three days, after which there will be a voting period of five days. Cheers, chris [0]: https://package-maintainer-bylaws.aur.archlinux.org/#_special_removal_of_an… [1]: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-tu@lists.archlinux.org/threa… [2]: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-tu@lists.archlinux.org/messa… [3]: https://aur.archlinux.org/package-maintainer [4]: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/nicohood

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Re: About the intentionally duplicated package wechat-beta-bwrap and wechat-universal and unmaintained orginal package wechat-uos
by Kimiblock Moe 01 May '24

01 May '24

Hi Aᴀʀᴏɴ, The duplicated package has 55 votes, while the original version wechat-uos-qt has 19. I’m not losing patience though, just a little curious about why this thread appeared inactive. I guess PMs have been flooded with requests recently… -- Sincerely, Kimiblock

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About user Manjusaka
by Fabio Loli 27 Apr '24

27 Apr '24

Hi, Manjusaka continue to re-upload his personal pkgbuild which have been deleted 3 times already, they have been informed to not do this yes persist https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/linux-xanmod-manjusaka https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/search?count=25&mlist=aur-requests%40l…

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Aarch64 package moderation policy
by Sam Day 15 Apr '24

15 Apr '24

Hello! I recently learned that the AUR seems to have an actively enforced moderation policy preventing packages that either only work on aarch64, or are otherwise heavily focused/only useful on that platform. RFC0032 hasn't finalized yet, and of course it could still end up being rejected or otherwise put on indefinite hiatus... My outsider perspective is that it likely will happen though, so I'm working under that assumption. In this case, it's only a matter of time before non-x86 communities are accumulating around Arch upstream proper. RFC0032 already notes that: - Ideally, the AUR web interface / API is extended to allow filtering packages by architecture. I have a concrete proposal here. Let's say I (or someone else) were to contribute the necessary changes to aurweb, such that it exposed architecture info in the RPC (archlinux/aurweb#485), as well as adding support for filtering by architecture when searching. If this happened, and the search box on the AUR homepage defaulted to x86, would it be possible to relax the current moderation policy that restricts aarch64-only packages from living in the AUR? -Sam

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