Hello,
i was just trying to help cleanup AUR. didn't mean any harm. i wrote some script myself to help me do this. i do pick up packages that look like people use.
Not everyone votes for packages, just because they are not voted for does not mean nobody uses them (but it is a good indication in most cases). However, even then, deleting potentially useful packages simply because they are outdated, orphaned or no longer work can be counter productive, someone may want to adopt and maintain this at a further date. Considering the deletion requests were accepted, I assume the options of the Arch Linux package maintainers differ on this point, but PKGBUILD repositories have tiny storage capacity, it doesn't hurt to leave them.
see my answer: https://lists.archlinux.org/hyperkitty/list/aur-general@lists.archlinux.org/...
You shouldn't delete a package simply because it is outdated, unless of course the source code is no longer available, or the project has completely disappeared, if it is fixable it should be left alone, if it is broken completely and not fixable then it should be deleted. Blanket deleting everything is just a pain. At least in my opinion.
i added that because of namcap.
Namcap can flag a lot, I remember it getting confused on one of my packages and saying a dependency is missing, added the dependency and then it said the same dependency was redundant. It is useful for a quick check, but it does not currently beat experienced users. Also you can do dependency checks using ldd, and then looking up the sonames for the package names, and if they are in base then they do not need to be in depends(). Any dependencies for compiling do not need to be specified if they are in base-devel. However as I have said, it doesn't hurt to specify them, in fact I believe quite a few package maintainers swear by listing every dependency regardless of whether it is installed by default or not.
thanks a lot. i will fix up everything as soon as possible.
No problem.
sorry, i wasn't trying to be an asshole who just wants the title to show off. i added those numbers not to flex but to help determine. but as i read my own email now, it's looks stupid.
I would like to point out that contributing is not about how much you do, even a single patch is worthwhile. Of course the more you contribute the more likely you are to be offered positions, but it is also about activity, and most of all, whether the staff actually like you (I am out of luck there :P). I do believe there is a big myth within the open source community that you need to be some amazing developer which makes lots of changes in order to contribute, but it really is the opposite. Something as little as fixing typos, or updating broken links is worthwhile contributions. Some contributors can't even code, yet they still give their time and do what they can do. The biggest thing to remember in Arch Linux is "there's an ArchWiki page for that", and there literally is, see: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Getting_involved (I believe there is also a separate website which you click your skills and it shows the roles you could provide, but I can't remember the URL, nor could I find it when doing a quick search :P) Personally I loved contributing to the ArchWiki, because it doesn't take much skill, it is just a high effort role with a lot to do, which makes it a lot of fun to just chill out, programming can take up a lot of energy and skill, and writing packages can be frustrating, especially for those who haven't got good communication skills, upstream will f*ck you over a ton, so I definitely recommend having a mixture of roles, there is only so much bs I can take from developers which have forgotten the most important thing with software, the distribution of said software. I could go on for hours speaking about how flatpak and appimages are ruining Linux, but I will keep this controversy to myself and save everyone subscribed to the mailing list the pain of reading it :P The point I am trying to make is, there is a lot you can do without needing to become staff.
for the full context, my first contribution to AUR was a deletion req because the package i was trying to install was broken and thought it would be a good idea to report this to maintainers. googled about it and saw people talking about deletion request. after that i, found some other broken packages and reported them. it was the time of covid, so i had a lot of time on hand, thus i started to seek broken packages. i tested them and commented/mailed them to fix or reported them for deletion. at that time i started to maintain some packages too.
Although this is useful, try not to spam the requests, I remember seeing the flood of requests you caused in the past, and I got to admit it was slightly infuriating, because you are looking for a specific request and yet all you have is zoorat spam. I think something which does need to be brought up is a feature to mass delete package and their subpackages, in a dependency style way. If some software has hundreds of plugins packaged for it, and the main package is deleted, then (as far as I am aware), all the plugins need to be flagged for deletion which then means the requests get flooded. Maybe there is a feature which exists already, but I am not aware of it (maybe a package maintainer can comment on this?).
i wanted to be a TU because i thought i could help test and validate other people's deletion requests. as my req would take quite a while, i thought i could be useful. nothing else.
after reporting 500+ `ros-jade-*` broken packages, @ainola mailed me to
You got to remember that this duty is a small section of being a package maintainer. If I remember correctly there is plans to split up the roles even more, package maintainers will only be maintaining packages, and not dealing with the requests in the future, if I remember the future plans correctly. This might be what you want in the future, to be able to handle requests, without having the duties of package maintainers (maintaining [extra]) or developers (maintaining [core]). So I guess the TL;DR hear is hold your horses and just go on as you have been, the world isn't changed overnight, and especially how you young you still have a ton of time. thank me for the help.
and i asked him about being a TU. he said my account was young at that time and to keep helping them... the last email was just to get know about my state...
I think you took ainola way too literally, the age of your account doesn't really factor into it, they aren't going to accept you over someone else because your account is 3 years older. This kind of reminds me when people used to complain about me being too young, and took that too literally, it was about how I acted, not the legitimate age, took that one way too literally. I believe their point is the fact that you are too new, you weren't around the community, which if you read the mailing list for fun like I do, you will see many TU applications getting heated because someone is applying without being apart of the community, the sense of community in Arch Linux is very strong, if you do not proactively speak to others, you do make it harder to consider yourself. I can't remember who told me this, but someone once told me "You do not need to contribute to be apart of the community", my response was "I can't be apart of a community which I do not actively attempt to contribute to", the point I am trying to make is community comes first, contributions come later, although I can't really comment on this considering I constantly push myself out the community because of my actions, but I do understand the importance :)
i have reported bug before in bugzilla and joining the test team sounds fun :)
Well they are some steps forward :)
i wasn't active on the mailing list or irc but i was maintaining my packages.
These are questions you would be asked in your application, where are you active, where do you communicate with the community. A big role of package maintainers, and staff as a whole, is to give their time to helping others on the mailing list or on IRC, so it does have very high importance.
i didn't mean to disrespect any maintainer here.
I doubt you disrespected or offended anyone, don't worry about it.
this is the reason i wasn't very interested in maintaining packages at first... and i don't adopt complex c/c++ based packages for this reason but started to get out of my comfort zone nowadays
These are skills you will need to develop, a package maintainer which can only package a very small subsection of software due to lack of skill wouldn't be a good fit would it? I have the tendency to adopt the most awful packages to maintain, which upstream proactively hinders the ability to package them, and they just tell you to dump the entire binary into /opt and call it a day, which seems to be common these days, autoupdate scripts which pollute your system. I do need to learn one day, that if something is too hard to package because of upstream, to just learn to cut my losses and give up, spending months trying to package one piece of software is not worth it, compared to other easier software which could be more useful as a whole which could be packaged in that time span.
sure. it's not like i will just stop contributing here because i see myself being a maintainer. i wanna help with the open source project i use, that's why i contribute in AUR.
Well continue doing that. And once you become fluent in packaging, especially for specific languages (because languages tend to be packaged in similar conventional ways, see the language specific package guidelines on the ArchWiki for more information), you can help others learn to do it and keep the community growing :)
i'm really really grateful for your answers.
No problem, glad it helped.
helped me a lot.
Good.
have a nice day.
You too.
p.s. english is not my first language. ask me anything if it confuses you.
A little note for you, ArchWiki needs translators for specific languages, your native language could become a useful skill over there, if you are interested in translation that is. May I ask what your native language is? Take care, -- Polarian GPG signature: 0770E5312238C760 Website: https://polarian.dev JID/XMPP: polarian@icebound.dev