On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 9:16 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee@gmail.com> wrote:

http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/cower/

Thoughts? I was under the impression we didn't do this, and definitely on purpose, otherwise people have *no* idea the AUR is different in a lot of ways. Making people go the "hard way" to get a helper installed at least presents some (necessary) barrier.

-Dan

I suppose it depends on what we want the barrier to be. In lieu of one of Xyne's flowcharts, consider the raw interaction with the AUR to be something like: search -> download -> extract -> makepkg -> pacman cower draws the line after extraction, because I consider the process to be trivial up until that point. A completely uninformed user who learns how to use the AUR website and/or cower is still left in the same position after extraction -- they have some strange text files on their hard drive. A monkey* could get this far. The responsibility still lies with the user to understand what they've downloaded and what needs to be done with those files. makepkg, and the understanding of, is too important to be masked by another program. I do, however, understand the concern that existance of a tool in community to fetch said strange files may make them appear to be more supported than unsupported. dave * a real monkey, not one of our users.