Re: [aur-general] Remove ardour3-svn

Excerpts from Allan McRae's message of 2010-12-21 04:22:58 +0100:

On 21/12/10 08:30, Xyne wrote:

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Bernardo Barros wrote:

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Hi,

I suggest to remove ardour3-svn from AUR. It's not ready for use yet. See message from the author below.

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=34433

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Paul Davis Date: 2010/12/20 Subject: Re: [LAU] Ardour3 To: Bernardo Barros Cc: Fabio, linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 1:05 PM, Bernardo Barros wrote:

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It's not really a oficial arch binary package, paul.. it's a arch user script that builds from svn.

that doesn't make a whole heap of difference. people who use svn are at least 1 step closer to understanding that the first step after a crash is "svn update". people using arch build scripts ... not so much, i suspect. moreover, people using svn are probably (hopefully!) on the commit mailing list and can see that the version they got this morning is now 8 commits old by lunchtime. again, people using arch build scripts ... not so much

I don't agree with him. Any real archer will want to use a PKGBUILD to do this. Removing it from the AUR will just force people to recreate the same PKGBUILD themselves and for no good reason. Admittedly the AUR in combination with the various AUR helpers makes it easy for a casual user to install the package, but I don't think there will be a wave of disinterested users installing the package. Plus those very same AUR helpers make it trivial to quickly update to the latest version with a single command.

I recommend leaving it on the AUR while making it *very* clear that it is strictly for development and testing, and that users should subscribe to the upstream mailing list.

You could do this by including very visible instructions in the post_install message (along with a once-off post_update message to inform existing users).

This is only my opinion though. I'm interested in the other TUs' views.

My view is that there is no need for informational post_install or post_update messages (and I find those annoying in general...). Especially given this obviously a svn snapshot for a branch that has seen no release yet. I work on the assumption that the users of Arch are not stupid[*] and know what they are installing on their systems. They would have gone out of their way not to just install the ardour package from the repos for a reason.

[*] well, lets just say I do to make this point... :P

Allan

IMHO the problem is that A3 is still far from a release, so SVN is used for heavy development at the moment while with lots of other project development is a lot slower and only bugfixes go there. Meaning: with a lot of software SVN is 'safe' to use while it currently isn't for A3. Paul doesn't want casual users to try it yet but on the other hand makes it appear as if the release is just around the corner to keep his revenue stream flowing. And it's not the first time and not the only way he tries to control ardour distribution. Not our problem I'd say.