Excerpts from Heiko Baums's message of 2010-11-16 15:02:19 +0100:
Am Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:27:50 +0800 schrieb Ng Oon-Ee <ngoonee@gmail.com>:
I thought this idea of Heiko's was a great idea, myself. In a fit of inspiration, here's a suggestion. This would be placed after the last sentence of the 2nd paragraph in the 3-paragraph description.
"This community involvement allows developers to focus on what's most important to them in the knowledge that the community will provide high quality packages for everything else."
Maybe there should be added that Arch Linux is only a distro from its devs for its devs and not from the community for the community.
I wish you wouldn't add such a paragraph. Instead the ignorance of some devs should be removed. That was the better way.
And Heiko, I'm not sure why you're making a big fuss over these packages. Its not even much harder to work from the AUR. Comparisons to Gentoo are ridiculous. I've got 75 packages from the AUR currently, and I don't spend hours a day compiling. The longest package to compile is probably samba4 at 20 minutes, followed by the kernel at 10 minutes (optimized), everything else tops out at 1-2 minutes. Go have a cup of coffee, and consider the difference to the hours and hours you'd have spent compiling world on Gentoo.
I already used Gentoo for 6 years. So I know what that compiling means. That's why I was looking for a binary distro in the style of Gentoo. That's why I came to Arch Linux 3 or 4 years ago.
And the more small packages need to be compiled from AUR the more time it takes compiling them. Many a little makes a mickle.
It's not at all about compile times IMHO but about the effort necessary to keeping source packages up-to-date. Doing this manually would be a major PITA for even a relatively small number of packages. AUR helpers like slurpy help a bit, but the required effort is still significantly higher than with binary packages. How much effort it requires depends IMHO almost entirely on the number of packages. JFYI I currently maintain 89 AUR packages and have probably about 180 AUR packages from other maintainers installed. There is does mean effort, believe me or not.
My main problems are this mass cleanup and the ignorant responses I get from some devs to such remarks or to some bug reports etc.
That's why I make such a fuss.
Heiko