- Aur-general - lists.archlinux.org

[aur-general] TU application.
by Peter Lewis 12 Sep '10

12 Sep '10

Hi folks, After the recent discussions about the number of TUs, the size of [community] etc., I have decided to apply to be a Trusted User myself. Chris Brannon has kindly agreed to sponsor me. So, here's my application. ..oO----Oo.. Who am I? I'm 30 and I live in Birmingham in the UK. I'm a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, in the School of Computer Science. I also teach programming there (Java mainly). When I'm not on the computer, I'm into hiking, photography, growing my own veg, making home-brew beer and that sort of thing. I have a largely non-technical blog here, in case you're interested: http://www.petesodyssey.org/ ..oO----Oo.. What's my experience? I've been a day-to-day GNU/Linux user since around 1998, when I got hold of a SuSE magazine cover CD and installed it on (IIRC) my AMD K6 machine. I used SuSE, Debian, *buntu and Gentoo for day to day stuff, before finding Arch about two years ago. I also spent a while learning about how Linux systems are put together going through the Linux From Scratch book and all that. I have to say that (and I know this is preaching to the choir but) Arch impressed me immediately and still does. When I found it, I had just spent a few weeks trying to understand the Debian packaging manual and had given up being able to learn how to do what I wanted (which was basically Linux From Scratch but with a way to manage updates). I can only describe the transition to Arch as feeling like my computer was working for me again, rather than against me (or worse, me for it)! I now use Arch on my laptop for everyday work - mainly scientific simulations and writing research papers. I also run another couple of boxes (one mainly for gaming, the other runs mythtv) as well as an Arch VPS at Linode, which handles my mail, web and other hosting needs. I was the first person (I think) to use Arch in our department at the university, and since then I've helped another half a dozen or so people make the switch. We run a "Linux Install Day" each year for the new students, and while most of them seem to want Ubuntu (because they've heard of it), I try to get hold of the ones that are more interested in understanding what's going on and spend a bit of time with them setting up Arch. They are always really appreciative and it's cool then watching them demonstrating their uber1337ness to the other students. It's actually becoming quite well appreciated as a distro in the department as a whole. Anyway... I do a lot of coding and have mainly used Java, C, C++ and PHP. I've also done a bit of Python and Ruby. Unfortunately not much of my code gets into open source projects, but I can usually find my way around unfamilar code bases pretty well and so have no trouble adding the odd patch here and there to fix things and make them work. I think this would be a useful skill when packaging things for Arch. I should point out that I'm in no way a black-belt at Bash, but I can certainly put together shell scripts for the things I need, and just tend to learn stuff as and when I need it. I aim to learn more of the ninja shell scripting stuff through being a TU, to be honest. ..oO----Oo.. Why do I want to be a TU? Well, you see there are all these really helpful people making Arch so great. And I've benefited from all that. So, I figure it's time I contribute something back. (Ask not what your distro can do for you, but what you can do for your distro... or something.) It also seems to me that there should be more TUs (without compromising quality, of course). I know that statistics aren't everything, but these made me stop and think: Packages in unsupported: 24406 Trusted Users: 22 (There have actually been over 66 new packages in the AUR in the last week.) Even with the best and most dedicated TUs in the world, and lots of help from ordinary users, I don't think that that kind of number of people can keep the AUR wheels greased, let alone maintain [community] too. I think it's a credit to the current and previous TUs that the AUR is the great thing that it is (and let's be honest, it's a big attraction of Arch). More TUs putting more effort into fewer packages each (preferably that they use) must be better than fewer TUs trying to have oversight of lots that they don't use much. As Chris rightly pointed out to me, people tend to care more about things that they use. Actually, by being a TU I also hope to learn more about what goes into making something like Arch so great, as well as improving my own skills. ..oO----Oo.. So what would I do as a TU? Well, mainly three things: 1) Maintain popular packages well and reliably. I currently maintain 7 packages in the AUR, and am interested particularly in things relating to science and research (e.g. latex, octave, sage, bibliographic management stuff like mendeley and kbib), as well as KDE things (I've been building and using KDE since version 1.0). And while I think it's ideal when people maintain things that they use themselves, this wouldn't restrict me from taking on other packages that I don't use. See my current packages here: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?SeB=m&K=petelewis 2) Promote Arch and the TU scheme. As I said, I think we need more TUs, while maintaining our high standard. I'd like to promote the TU scheme and get more skilled Arch users to take on maintaining the packages that they use. I think a world where more people maintain a small number of packages each in [community] will lead to a bigger and higher quality [community] repo. We should advertise, with the aim of having many more TUs. This also means that we shouldn't be afraid of voting people down if they're not yet ready, and give feedback to help them improve and invite them to apply again later. We all benefit from this. 3) Maintain / improve processes and package standards. I think that standard processes and packages are very important, and can make life using Arch a lot easier. It's also important that the processes are right, and this means attention to detail. Things like package naming and categories fall into this. I think a large part of the job of a TU is to keep the AUR clean and clear, and I would spend time helping to achieve this. I have in mind that bits of additional functionality, such as to enabling deletion requests to be handled through the web interface, perhaps duplicate flagging and package renaming would be useful and make the job of a TU easier. Over time, I would investigate implementing things like this. Also on processes, I'm a bit of a geek for democratic stuff, constitutions and bye-laws and things. I've worked with a couple of quite large democratic organisations on their election and decision-making rules and would be interested in helping to keep these working well for the good of Arch and us all too. Again, it's important to get the rules right, but in addition to hard rules, often establishing good etiquette is just as important (but IMO preferably without going down the Ubuntu route of canned responses). I think Arch people are good at this kind of thing, but I think it always helps to have people who are interested in keeping things fresh. If there are any questions, I'm very happy to try to answer them. Cheers, and thanks for reading. Pete.

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[aur-general] Permissions of community-staging need to be reset
by Eric Bélanger 12 Sep '10

12 Sep '10

Hi, Could an AUR admin (or Andrea) reset the perms of the community-staging repo db for both arches? Thanks

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[aur-general] Package removal request
by doorknob60 12 Sep '10

12 Sep '10

(sorry if you got this twice, I'm pretty sure the first one didn't work) The fretsonfire-alarian-mod package needs to be deleted, I have replaced it with the fofix package.

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[aur-general] ContextFree orphan request
by Hilton Medeiros 11 Sep '10

11 Sep '10

Hi, please, could someone orphan this package: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=13081 It is not updated since 2008. Thanks in advance, Hilton

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[aur-general] The Arch Way
by Christoph 11 Sep '10

11 Sep '10

Hi, I have just adopted the package xmind (http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=22394) because the former maintainer disowned it, and I am not shure which is the best way to build the package. There are three possibilities: 1) Building from source 2) Building from the "Portable" zip-file (see http://www.xmind.net/downloads/) 3) Building from the deb-files provided for Debian/Ubuntu (see http://www.xmind.net/downloads/) ad 1) This is what you would usually do, but according to http://groups.google.com/group/xmind-dev/browse_thread/thread/d68d0c8f30b4b… the eclipse ide would be a prerequisite, so that would need a very large download if you do not already have installed eclipse (nearly 170 MB for eclipse plus 10 MB for the xmind source code!) ad 2) This was the way the former maintainer went. Download size: 75 MB The portable zip-file contains both the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions, so the PKGBUILD just had to copy the right files. ad 3) When I proposed (a year ago) to use the deb-files instead in order to have smaller downloads (each of them, 32-bit and the 64-bit has appr. 36 MB), the maintainer told me that this would be ugly and "not the Arch way", that he would not do such a thing. When I told him that I did not get the point of it, since the zip file equally just installed ready-built binaries, he did not respond to it. I still think that using the deb-files would - in this special case - be the best option. But of course I would never dare to deviate from "the Arch way" (since it is the way to world domination, as we all know ;-)). What do you think? Christoph

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[aur-general] New repositories (community-staging, multilib-testing)
by Thomas Bächler 11 Sep '10

11 Sep '10

The TU server now has a staging repository, this has been requested due to the big python rebuild. All rebuilds that are made for the staging repository should be put into community-staging now. multilib now has a testing repository, in case we need it (especially useful when testing has a new toolchain). Last but not least, the adjust-permissions cronjob has been disabled on both servers - should you mess with the db file directly (which you really shouldn't), never forget to restore the right permissions.

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[aur-general] Haskell hlint
by Nathan O 11 Sep '10

11 Sep '10

I found hlint at http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=23099 going through the orphaned packages, so I went to check the homepage of the software at http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hlint and the author lists package haskell-hlint at http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=34172 Both of them were created by the Arch Haskell team it says at top. "haskell-hlint" is up-to-date, while hlint isn't the differences are mainly that haskell-lint has more dependencies listed and builds/installs and does additional manual install of scripts than "hlint" . So probably hlint should be deleted. Thanks

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[aur-general] Why is aur.archlinux.org so slow? :(
by Sven-Hendrik Haase 10 Sep '10

10 Sep '10

Whenever I try uploading a reasonably large package to aur.archlinux.org, my average speed is around 500KB/s. This appears to be an artificial limitation since a server would have at least 10/10MBits uplink. I therefore request the speed limit to be disabled in order to be able to upload large packages with all available bandwidth to increase productivity. Or is there a reason for the limit? -- Sven-Hendrik

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[aur-general] Please delete some chicken-egg packages
by Jim Pryor 10 Sep '10

10 Sep '10

Hi I maintain all the chicken-* packages in AUR; these are "eggs" or extensions for the Chicken Scheme compiler and interpreter. I'll soon push a bunch of updates. However, these eggs are now unsupported and should be removed from AUR: chicken-crypto-tools http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=32677 chicken-mailbox-threads http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=32763 chicken-multimethod http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=32770 chicken-termite http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=32835 chicken-wiki-parse http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=32851 Thanks. -- Jim Pryor profjim(a)jimpryor.net

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[aur-general] ruby-gtk2 and friends
by Brad Fanella 10 Sep '10

10 Sep '10

I adopted ruby-gtk2, ruby-atk, ruby-gdkpixbuf2, ruby-glib2, and ruby-pango in the AUR recently to update the package and fix some issues with it. If I remember correctly, these packages used to be in community and were recently removed. Was there a good reason for this, or was it just a matter of not caring to maintain it anymore? As these are very popular packages, I would like to move them to community (if nobody objects of course). Thanks, Brad

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