2008/1/28, Qianqian Fang <fangqq@gmail.com>:

thank you Bob for clarifying the policy and workflow. I will forward your message to the submitters and encourage them applying for TU if they decide to take the responsibility.

If there happen to be a TU that are familiar with Chinese fonts issues, and would like to share the responsibility, please also let us know.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Trusted_Users#shinlun ;-) -- Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)

On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 11:02:15AM -0500, w9ya@qrparci.net wrote:

Hey Qianqian and the gang;

I am glad that you decided to write.

There are a couple of things that are important for you and the submitters you mention to understand about the "community" package repository.

First, the TU's are expected to maintain the trust of the user community by maintaining the quality of the packages they take 'responsibility' for when adopting. SO.... unless the TU understands your language requirements, they should NOT be willing to adopt your packages.

Second, ANYONE can petition to become a TU, including the submitters of the packages you mention below. One merely has to ask to be sponsored. I am sure the submitters you mentioned will find sponsors if the packages they have submitted are of sufficient quality.

SO ... the problem you outline below is easily solved and should be corrected within a couple of weeks of your submitters petitioning to become a TU.

Once becoming a TU the only three requirements to remain a TU are to vote when asked to on matters concerning TUs, maintain good and non-destructive packages to the *outlined* standards, and not be destructive when using the repository storage facilities.

I hope this helps.

Very best regards;

Bob Finch

...

hi all

I am not sure if this is the right place to post an adoption request, if not, please advise me the appropriate mailing list.

I am an upstream author of a set of popular Chinese fonts. My team and I spent the past 3.5 years developing high quality free fonts for CJK users, including the first manually fine-tuned multi-strike bitmap font with full coverage to GB18030 charset (WenQuanYi Bitmap Song), and the first open-source Hei Ti (sans-serif) vector font (WenQuanYi Zen Hei).

These fonts are quite popular in the Chinese community, and widely distributed by Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu etc. Contributors also packaged these fonts for ArchLinux, with the hope of benefiting ArchLinux Chinese users. The links to these packages can be found at

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?K=wqy

The submitters of the packages recently contacted me and expressed their desires of pushing these fonts to "community", as both fonts got reasonable votes and popularity among the users. However, they have not yet been able to locate a TU to adopt these packages.

So, we are looking for TU(s) who is able to take and help maintaining these Chinese font packages. The package submitters (CCed) and the upstream are willing to help and clarify things in the process of packaging.

Please let us know if you are interested. thank you for your attention.

Qianqian

The above are a fine example of what i was talking about in my previous emails on this list, stating that TU's should provide as binaries packages that the community wants and not only the packages they want to maintain. Here we have a TU who has uploaded 29 packages in community, without getting them to unsupported first. One of his packages has 2 votes, half of the remaining ones have 1 and the rest 0. Yet he finds it very easy to reply when someone requests for some much more popular packages than the ones he is maintaining to get into community, that a TU should be interested in them to adopt them and he should know chinese to maintain them. As if Eric Belanger aka Snowman knows arabic, greek and simplified chinese in order to maintain his xpdf packages. I dont remember nor really care what the TU guidelines say about this, but behaviours like this by "Trusted Users" IMO are not acceptable. I clearly remember "Remember to vote for your favourite packages! The most popular packages will be provided as binary packages in [community]." though. If the Guidelines dont state the above, IMO it should be added. The AUR as well as the Arch community have got much bigger than when those guidelines were written. Greg

On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 09:40:27PM +0100, Ronald van Haren wrote:

On Jan 28, 2008 7:14 PM, Grigorios Bouzakis <grbzks@gmail.com> wrote:

...

The above are a fine example of what i was talking about in my previous emails on this list, stating that TU's should provide as binaries packages that the community wants and not only the packages they want to maintain. Here we have a TU who has uploaded 29 packages in community, without getting them to unsupported first. One of his packages has 2 votes, half of the remaining ones have 1 and the rest 0. Yet he finds it very easy to reply when someone requests for some much more popular packages than the ones he is maintaining to get into community, that a TU should be interested in them to adopt them and he should know chinese to maintain them. As if Eric Belanger aka Snowman knows arabic, greek and simplified chinese in order to maintain his xpdf packages. I dont remember nor really care what the TU guidelines say about this, but behaviours like this by "Trusted Users" IMO are not acceptable. I clearly remember "Remember to vote for your favourite packages! The most popular packages will be provided as binary packages in [community]." though. If the Guidelines dont state the above, IMO it should be added. The AUR as well as the Arch community have got much bigger than when those guidelines were written.

Greg

I'm sorry but as much I understand the point you make, I'm with Bob on this one. I don't see any point in maintaining a package if I can't understand the language. There is no way for us to test the package, we can't even make up from the site if a new package is released, or the project is abandoned. Well, you get my point.

I see you dont comment on the fact that bfinch maintains ONLY his own packages, which is the most important part of what i wrote above. Can you tell me what good is a "Trusted User" who doesnt maintain ANY packages others have uploaded? Since most TU's dont provide much code, and the ones who do will logically become developers sooner or later, the least the community is "expecting" from them is packaging binaries of the most popular applications in AUR. As much as they can or feel like it of course. Isnt that the whole point of being a "Trusted User"? Or am i missing something? As i have said before i evaluate TU's and developers exactly the same when it comes to packaging. As far as i know, there isnt a chinese developer also. Yet Arch tries to provide multilingual support despite that fact. Believe me, if you actually package such apps, users will help you maintain them by submitting bug reports or tell email or comments etc if you screw up. When theres a will theres a way.

Second, if you want to change the guidelines, become a TU. I really don't think you should have such an attitude without volunteering to become a TU yourself and do things better than we all are currently doing.

Regarding this part, i dont think one should be a TU to contribute to Arch. I try to help as much and any other way that i can. Personally i use like 5-6 packages from community, and only one of them uses the same PKGBUILD as the one the TU has uploaded. All others are packaged differently.If i was more interested in graphical tools or obscure hardware and devices support and the packages in the repo in general, i would probably have considered about applying already. I am assuming the guidelines were/are written by TUs but hearing someone elses point of view never hurt anyone. Just like i try doing in real life too, when i see something thats IMO totally wrong regarding something i love/care a lot about i try to fix it. Or at least tell the ones responsible for it about my thoughts and ideas. If you dont agree its fine. PS. I have nothing against people and this not a personal attack. I am only objecting to they way some of them act, furthermore when they have a title. Also just like in real life, people who have some kind of power are subject to more critisism than the ones who dont. Greg

Hi, don't you think that

want to say something, don't unless you are a TU

and

TUs and non-TUs are all part of the community

are the tiniest bit contradictory? Besides, I think that a critisism to a certain level coming from a non-TU isn't unhealthy. Unless it turns really ugly and somebody does nothing but complaining all the time (which I don't think was this case), while refusing doing something themselves, I really think that "common" users should be allowed to speak. Ondřej -- Cheers, Ondřej Kučera

Hi,

29-01-08, Ondřej Kučera <ondrej.kucera@centrum.cz> napisał(a):

...

don't you think that

I'm sorry, I might have been misunderstood.

...

...

want to say something, don't unless you are a TU

This is what I don't like.

...

...

TUs and non-TUs are all part of the community

And this is my opinion.

Oh, now I see. In that case I agree completely. :-) Ondřej -- Cheers, Ondřej Kučera