On 2022-07-25 20:09, Jonathon Fernyhough via aur-general wrote:
While EndeavourOS is one of the closest derivatives I'm aware of, they still have their own repo with some tooling and hooks which might (maybe) affect things once installed (package building can/should be done in a clean Arch chroot so that's never an issue). Therefore, running some instance of Arch proper (even if it's in a VM) is likely to be important, as you say, for testing and validation.
I would indeed expect all building and smoketesting of packages to be carried out on a vanilla Arch system. Doing the building on a derivative distribution, however small its modifications might be, might introduce subtle reproducibility bugs that I would like to avoid at all costs. I also expect all packagers to do basic testing of their packages on a standard system to catch obvious packaging mistakes.
Having said all of this, I'd also wait to hear from any devs/TUs who want to weigh in on this; they might consider that an Arch TU not running Arch might be a bit weird. xD
On the other hand, I have absolutely no issue with packagers also running or contributing to derivative distributions: it feels to me like there are not many connections between upstream Arch and its ports/derivatives, which is a pity. I think there is a lot of collaboration potential not only w.r.t. packaging, but also regarding usage and improvement of distribution-specific tooling (e.g. dbscripts/repod, keyringctl, ...). Having an active EndeavourOS contributor feels like a great way to bridge this perceived gap a bit. To reiterate, I expect any member of the Arch staff to take an active role in the Arch community. Using Arch only as a "service platform" to get packages into derivative distributions wouldn't work well, but that is absolutely not the impression I get from this TU application. On the other hand, there is no rule forbidding staff members to use other distributions as well, and I see no reason why derivatives of Arch should be special in that regard. Best, Jonas