On Jan 19, 2008 4:08 AM, Aaron Schaefer <aaron@elasticdog.com> wrote:
On Jan 18, 2008 8:50 AM, bardo <ilbardo@gmail.com> wrote:
This came to my mind reading the discussion about Sergej, but after some thinking I couldn't make up a clear opinion about it, so this thread just brings up the question.
There's a few packages I maintain in unsupported that almost nobody voted, so I never moved them to [community]. But what if I use them in my daily activities? I'm interested in having an up-to-date package, so I'd maintain, build and test it anyway... should I share it with its (small) user base?
Corrado
This is my take...I don't see any down side to including the packages in community. I suppose you could say that bandwidth on the mirrors would be one, but that's about it. People are arguing that the AUR should be run like to official repositories where the devs ask the other devs if it's okay to add packages to extra/core, but their reasoning for the recent cleanup and rules regarding that aspect are because those two repos define Arch Linux as a distribution. That's not really the case with community.
Even if only a few people are voting for the packages, like Corrado said, the TU is doing the work anyway, so why not let everyone benefit from it since downloading/installing from the community repo is a lot easier for everyone than building from a PKGBUILD, especially if you're not familiar with building from source. Plus votes might not be an accurate portrayal of usage, if you consider that many times dependencies of a popular package might not have nearly as many votes as the package that requires them, but I'd still put them in the same repo for convenience.
Yes, the TUs should be helping to move popular packages in to community as well, but ideally it would be a package that they are interested in using themselves so they actually will be able to test and use it themselves rather than just knowing that it built without errors. I think Allesio made that point very well.
From the guidelines in the wiki, I can only conclude that TUs have the duty to adopt and maintain popular packages (nothing is said about 'personal' packages though). Of course, I might be wrong if the guidelines in the wiki are already outdated or are no longer applicable/used. Lastly, the last line, "The voting mechanism in the AUR allows a TU to quickly gauge which packages users want." suggests
But the AUR Trusted User Guidelines says otherwise. Ideally, "... He/she maintains popular packages, ..." "A TU may adopt any package at any time. But because the TU's time is limited, he should try to only adopt popular packages. The voting mechanism in the AUR allows a TU to quickly gauge which packages users want." that TUs should also consider what the users want (maybe that's the reason why the repo was named 'community'). -- Darwin M. Bautista BS Electronics and Communications Engineering University of the Philippines Diliman http://www.darwin.uk.to University of the Philippines Linux Users' Group http://www.uplug.org