The community repository should still exist as there several packages that i use daily or weekly in fact such as amsn, dar, openobex, obexfs, compiz. Please don't remove the repository as i would like to see my daily applications being updated and easily downloaded. There are also some other useful package in community repository that i would like to try and not easily available from the previous distro I use. It is just 3 months that I have use Arch linux and I have yet to exploit the full power and unlimited possibilities of Arch linux. :-( On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 9:39 AM, <aur-general-request@archlinux.org> wrote:

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Packages in Community and votes. (Aaron Griffin) 2. Re: pkgstats and community - attempt 2 (Ond?ej Ku?era) 3. Re: pkgstats and community - attempt 2 (Brandon Martin) 4. Re: pkgstats and community - attempt 2 (Ronald van Haren) 5. Re: Packages in Community and votes. (Aaron Schaefer) 6. Re: Packages in Community and votes. (Loui Chang) 7. Re: Packages in Community and votes. (Aaron Schaefer)

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Message: 1 Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:05:40 -0600 From: "Aaron Griffin" <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [aur-general] Packages in Community and votes. To: "Discussion about the Arch User Repository (AUR)" <aur-general@archlinux.org> Message-ID: <d64a48980811101505g3a970bedtaaf399e460ed1da1@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 4:32 PM, Daenyth Blank <daenyth+arch@gmail.com> wrote:

...

1) The server is being strained (what parts exactly?) by the community repo.

It's primarily disk space and IO load issues.

The community repo and AUR are fairly large. A cron job which WAS keeping the AUR's permissions in check was actually pegging our system with so much load that we had to remove any handling of the AUR files (hope the code is good enough for that).

The AUR backend daemon opens every single package file (wtf?) when it runs, which is a HUGE resource hog. In an ideal world, someone would rewrite this to work the same way the offical repos work - with repo-add and a separate decoupled script to load the mysql database from a pacman DB.

Sizes on disk: community: 11G extra: 11G core: 330M unsupported: 800M

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Message: 2 Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:17:20 +0100 From: Ond?ej Ku?era <ondrej.kucera@centrum.cz> Subject: Re: [aur-general] pkgstats and community - attempt 2 To: "Discussion about the Arch User Repository (AUR)" <aur-general@archlinux.org> Message-ID: <4918C100.30907@centrum.cz> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-2; format=flowed

Hi,

Allan McRae wrote:

...

So lets start there. What should the [community] repo be doing? What is its purpose? There is no point discussing anything else until that is well defined. All responses must start with "The [community] repo is ..."

The [community] repo is - in my non-dev, non-TU very humble opinion - a repository for packages that are perhaps not as widely used as those in [core] or those in [extra] but still used by enough users, so that it's reasonable to provide them in binary form, providing that there is a way to do so. I always figured that there is only so many devs and only so many packages a single dev can maintain, which leads to a limited number of packages in [core]/[extra]. That's why there are TUs and that's why there is [community] - so that the number of packages provided in binary form (by people that hopefully can be trusted) is larger.

But what I actually wanted most to say was "amen" to your e-mail, Allan, I think you've summarized feelings of many people...

Ond?ej

-- Cheers, Ond?ej Ku?era

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Message: 3 Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:23:43 -0600 From: Brandon Martin <bmartin@cu3edweb.com> Subject: Re: [aur-general] pkgstats and community - attempt 2 To: "Discussion about the Arch User Repository (AUR)" <aur-general@archlinux.org> Message-ID: <afeffc3803b972349e442188e1eae9cf@cu3edweb.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

On Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:17:20 +0100, Ond?ej Ku?era <ondrej.kucera@centrum.cz> wrote:

...

Hi,

Allan McRae wrote:

...

So lets start there. What should the [community] repo be doing? What is its purpose? There is no point discussing anything else until that is well defined. All responses must start with "The [community] repo is ..."

The [community] repo is - in my non-dev, non-TU very humble opinion - a repository for packages that are perhaps not as widely used as those in [core] or those in [extra] but still used by enough users, so that it's reasonable to provide them in binary form, providing that there is a way to do so. I always figured that there is only so many devs and only so many packages a single dev can maintain, which leads to a limited number of packages in [core]/[extra]. That's why there are TUs and that's why there is [community] - so that the number of packages provided in binary form (by people that hopefully can be trusted) is larger.

But what I actually wanted most to say was "amen" to your e-mail, Allan, I think you've summarized feelings of many people...

The [community] repo is -

Very well put this is what I thougth the community repo was for also.

-- Brandon Martin

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Message: 4 Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:17:09 +0100 From: "Ronald van Haren" <pressh@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [aur-general] pkgstats and community - attempt 2 To: "Discussion about the Arch User Repository (AUR)" <aur-general@archlinux.org> Message-ID: <9fcf70360811101617h422b2615r5abd64eb2b064900@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-2

2008/11/11 Ond?ej Ku?era <ondrej.kucera@centrum.cz>:

...

Hi,

Allan McRae wrote:

...

So lets start there. What should the [community] repo be doing? What is its purpose? There is no point discussing anything else until that is well defined. All responses must start with "The [community] repo is ..."

The [community] repo is - in my non-dev, non-TU very humble opinion - a repository for packages that are perhaps not as widely used as those in [core] or those in [extra] but still used by enough users, so that it's reasonable to provide them in binary form, providing that there is a way to do so. I always figured that there is only so many devs and only so many packages a single dev can maintain, which leads to a limited number of packages in [core]/[extra]. That's why there are TUs and that's why there is [community] - so that the number of packages provided in binary form (by people that hopefully can be trusted) is larger.

But what I actually wanted most to say was "amen" to your e-mail, Allan, I think you've summarized feelings of many people...

Ond?ej

-- Cheers, Ond?ej Ku?era

IMO all that but without your last argument. Quite some TUs are also Devs at this very moment, so for the workload for them it doesn't matter. Still most of the packages they maintain should stay in community. Packages in community should be there because they are used by quite some people, but not enough to have them in extra, or packages that are a hype and have to prove that they are there to stay before they are put into extra (bmpx in extra comes to mind which development has stopped after like little over 1 year (?),just an example to make clear what I mean). Alpha software (for example e17) should also never be included in extra IMO (though some packages may not follow this rule if needed).

Hope it is clear enough, it's already late :p

Ronald

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Message: 5 Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:22:01 -0500 From: "Aaron Schaefer" <aaron@elasticdog.com> Subject: Re: [aur-general] Packages in Community and votes. To: "Discussion about the Arch User Repository (AUR)" <aur-general@archlinux.org> Message-ID: <e36e8c790811101622oeb928f9q25e3b0d908ba49d7@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

...

It's primarily disk space and IO load issues.

I have questions, mostly meant to get people thinking about alternatives and ramifications of any solutions...

If the real issue is disk space and IO, what about the possibility of a hardware upgrade? What about moving the largest packages to unsupported (or something like arch-games) instead of basing it on votes? It looks like eliminating just the top 10 largest community packages would save 1.8 GB of space! See http://rafb.net/p/Xfw0gh39.html for package sizes. What about putting community on it's own server? What about fixing the AUR backend? What about adding a CVS commit hook in the mean time to fix permissions on upload instead of running a single cron job?

If we make these proposed changes, how will they actually impact the server and it's current problems? How will they effect Arch users? What is the price of convenience that the community repo provides to Arch users? Will there be a way to easily differentiate packages in unsupported that are actually maintained by TUs? How can we reliably tell what is popular? Download numbers, voting, pkgstats, etc. all have their own issues and biases...is there a better way? What makes the most sense in the long run when there are sure to be more TUs and packages in community eventually? Should we worry about things that are currently in community, or just new packages?

My main point is that there are many options, and any solution that gets acted upon needs to be based on hard evidence for improvement and account for all consequences of that change rather than just basing it on what sounds good. There has been a lot of rabble-rousing and not much investigation into the underlying problems and proposed solutions.

-- Aaron "ElasticDog" Schaefer

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Message: 6 Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:00:10 -0500 From: Loui Chang <louipc.ist@gmail.com> Subject: Re: [aur-general] Packages in Community and votes. To: "Discussion about the Arch User Repository (AUR)" <aur-general@archlinux.org> Message-ID: <20081111010010.GK1071@lynn.lan> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 07:22:01PM -0500, Aaron Schaefer wrote:

...

...

It's primarily disk space and IO load issues.

I have questions, mostly meant to get people thinking about alternatives and ramifications of any solutions...

If the real issue is disk space and IO, what about the possibility of a hardware upgrade? What about moving the largest packages to unsupported (or something like arch-games) instead of basing it on votes? It looks like eliminating just the top 10 largest community packages would save 1.8 GB of space! See http://rafb.net/p/Xfw0gh39.html for package sizes. What about putting community on it's own server? What about fixing the AUR backend? What about adding a CVS commit hook in the mean time to fix permissions on upload instead of running a single cron job?

If we make these proposed changes, how will they actually impact the server and it's current problems? How will they effect Arch users? What is the price of convenience that the community repo provides to Arch users? Will there be a way to easily differentiate packages in unsupported that are actually maintained by TUs? How can we reliably tell what is popular? Download numbers, voting, pkgstats, etc. all have their own issues and biases...is there a better way? What makes the most sense in the long run when there are sure to be more TUs and packages in community eventually? Should we worry about things that are currently in community, or just new packages?

My main point is that there are many options, and any solution that gets acted upon needs to be based on hard evidence for improvement and account for all consequences of that change rather than just basing it on what sounds good. There has been a lot of rabble-rousing and not much investigation into the underlying problems and proposed solutions.

I've said this already in discussions but I'll say this again. Fixing the community back end, removing large packages, and removing unused packages are all possible solutions to the problem.

If we implement all the solutions, then we get an incremental improvment. Each solution will build upon the others. We shouldn't only implement one measure. We should implement ALL measures within reason.

I only raised the issue of unused or barely used packages in Community and pruning the repo. We should really be focusing on that before diverting the discussion and delving into other areas.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Community

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Message: 7 Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:39:25 -0500 From: "Aaron Schaefer" <aaron@elasticdog.com> Subject: Re: [aur-general] Packages in Community and votes. To: "Discussion about the Arch User Repository (AUR)" <aur-general@archlinux.org> Message-ID: <e36e8c790811101739g413cc24dvb86c5fa00bc877ae@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 8:00 PM, Loui Chang <louipc.ist@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I only raised the issue of unused or barely used packages in Community and pruning the repo. We should really be focusing on that before diverting the discussion and delving into other areas.

I know we've discussed this in IRC, but again my question is _why_ should this be the focus? Does it give us the most improvement for the least effort? Does it inconvenience users the least? Is it the cheapest? By how much? Is it the fastest? Why? Why? Why?

I'm open-minded about suggestions, but need something more substantial to back them up than just saying "we should do this". Where are the numbers to support the claim? Also, it seems as though the issue of popularity/voting and the community repo might be altogether different than the issue of server resources. Are we linking the two together because of a twist of fate with timing and pkgstats coming to fruition?

Aaron "ElasticDog" Schaefer

p.s. my link for package sizes will disappear in a day, here's a better one: http://omploader.org/vd3Vx --

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