On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 1:13 PM, Thomas S Hatch <thatch45@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 12:05 PM, Lukas Fleischer <archlinux@cryptocrack.de>wrote:
Greg, You have a valid point, personally I have always asked the
On Sat, Feb 05, 2011 at 11:45:20AM -0700, Thomas S Hatch wrote: maintainer
of a package for objections before moving a package into community. I also want to continue to express my deep gratitude for the packagers who contribute to the AUR. They are really the frontline in Arch development, the blood on the knife's edge.
We as trusted users need to show the devs in the AUR the utmost respect and appreciation. I would also like to point out: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/TU_Person_Specification All TUs we should adhere to the first bullet under "At Least" on this wiki entry.
I hope that my fellow TUs agree that we should give AUR contributors the utmost respect, they deserve it.
A behavior of respect will help us, the TUs, improve Arch, it will allow us to bring more people onto the Arch development teams, and continue our march to making Arch greater.
I personally asked for objections using AUR comments in most cases and waited some days before moving stuff. Nevertheless, I don't see a huge problem with just moving stuff. Moving a package to the binary repos shouldn't be regarded as stealing but as an improvement for the community. The AUR ain't a place for competitions (like "Which package has the most votes?" or "Who maintains the coolest packages?") but a place to provide source packages until a TU/Dev steps up and maintains the package in [community]/[extra]/[core].
Still, I'd prefer to have some announcement before moving a package. And another one just before removing it (so that users being notified about a package become aware of the move). AUR comments seem to be the appropriate place for this.
Angel has many good and valid points, I am proud of my contributions to open source and to Arch. My willingness to give without the expectation of receiving anything back has given me, personally, much more than I could have expected. Also it is true, that what you submit to the AUR, Arch reserves rights to.
But these points should not reduce the fact that a person contributed the package, and even when I have had to completely rewrite a PKGBUILD before moving the package to community I still think that it is important to recognize the maintainer who paved the road.
I am going to maintain, that a TU is not to be required to contact the AUR maintainer, but it is the courteous thing to do, and that we should develop and maintain an atmosphere of respect.
To reiterate Lukas, notifications should ALWAYS be placed before deleting AUR packages and moving AUR packages to community. Thats how I would draw the line, posting the comments about moves and deletions should be mandatory, and contacting the maintainer should be a strongly encouraged courtesy.
-Thomas S Hatch
I agree. Even if the packages are part of archlinux, the courteous thing to do would be to send an email before moving the packages to see if the original maintainer is onboard with it. Though he may not own it, he does have a sense of authorship, and that needs to be taken into account. We're still dealing with people here :) -Thomas