On 07/16/2018 01:47 PM, Shane Simmons via aur-requests wrote:

I never received any kind of notification that my account was suspended, or why. As far as I can recall, my best guess would be that it was because I had stupidly published a bug comment to the aurman AUR page and was harshly schooled by the aurman developer that his package depends on a -git package, which had to be installed manually because, again, stupidly, I didn't know that -git packages' PKGBUILDs don't contain the current version, but is instead calculated during install.

If that's why, after I understood the issue I just shrugged and went on with my life, and wasn't aware there was a continuing problem until I tried to push updates. I'm more than happy to push my changes if I can; if it can't be reinstated, though, then I'd at least like to know why, please.

I did that, because of: " Alad commented on 2018-06-06 12:00 I've already removed scores of spam from this page. The next guy who makes personal attacks or feels entitled to support without using the proper channels as kindly requested by the author will get his account suspended indefinitely. " And it is rather disingenuous to suggest that you posted *one* comment and then moved on with life. One comment, is the number of comments that weren't deleted. You've got another five comments there that I or alad deleted, which makes four comments (3 deleted) for that *one* issue, and another 2 unrelated but also deleted comments. ... Now let's consider why you were making all those comments on the AUR page to begin with. It's because you already responded to a closed, explained issue on the developer's Github repository: https://github.com/polygamma/aurman/issues/153#issuecomment-399191472 And you did so in a rude manner, on top of ignoring the resolution (you did not exactly ask for understanding, you merely told the developer he was wrong). He then banned you from his github repo *after explaining yet again*, apparently because he dislikes you and doesn't want to listen to you etc. yadda yadda yadda.[1] So... you moved over to the AUR and decided to treat that as a means of furthering your campaign of argumentation, after a couple exchanges of which I deleted most of the comments and suspended your AUR account too. Because if people aren't supposed to flood the AUR comments with questions about the upstream development, then that goes triple for using the AUR for the explicit purpose of circumventing the upstream developer's ban policy for their own support medium. FWIW your account is no longer suspended. But, keep in mind that again there was a pinned comment warning users about the kind of behavior likely to result in suspension. I don't want to see this sort of hounding again. Picking a misguided fight with people across two websites does not contribute value to the AUR. (Next time consider politely asking on e.g. aur-general "they say this is supposed to work, but I don't understand how, can some knowledgeable person please explain the concept to me".) -- Eli Schwartz Bug Wrangler and Trusted User [1] -- People are welcome to think whatever they wish about developers who practice an over-eager ban policy, as long as they think it somewhere other than the AUR. I also encourage people to read the discussion at https://github.com/polygamma/aurman/issues/140 before passing judgment.

when I said "posted to git" I meant "github" obv. On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 2:19 PM Shane Simmons wrote:

If anyone cares to review the comments, yes, I posted on the git repo, but only because of the admonishment that AUR isn't the place to post bugs on aurman. Or, you could review the comments if they weren't deleted. Part of mine were a plea to just leave the thread up for people who were similarly confused. Request denied, account locked, and a blanket message that peoples' accounts were being suspended for spam.

Had you simply posted a simple "make sure to install expac-git before upgrading or aurman will complain about broken dependencies" would have avoided having anyone post comments. Had expac-git actually been broken instead of me just not understanding that PKGVER doesn't get updated in a PKGBUILD ;-) relying on a nonexistent package would be a bug, no? ;-) Your response to that was to first post the output of pacman -Qi, then to hurl an insult about how users are turing-complete and I should act like I am. (I'm paraphrasing here because, quite frankly, I can't refer to the deleted comments.) It's not nearly as obvious as you seem to think it is (I generally avoid anything that has -git dependencies), and a simple google search shows that you need guidance sometimes, too. Treat others the way you want to be treated, imho.

As for the reason I posted to git, well,

"This is not the right place for reporting aurman bugs or request features, please use https://github.com/polygamma/aurman/issues

If you do not want to register on GitHub for such things, I do not care from now on.

I am not going to respond to comments on this page, if they have nothing to do with the PKGBUILD.

tl;dr: Bugs and feature requests -> GitHub, PKGBUILD problems -> here, not going to answer comments if they have nothing to do with the PKGBUILD from now on"

Anyway, my solution was pretty simple: just stop using aurman. If I'm going to lose access to AUR because my post is deemed Not A Problem, then I can't trust the software. I didn't go around to various forums posting about how people shouldn't use it; it's a popular AUR helper for a very good reason. I fully expect my account will be suspended shortly after I hit Send, and I guess that's fine. I'm not married to Arch, either, which I'll have to stop using because I won't just make packages for myself to keep using Upwork. But just...settle down. Not every non-positive comment is a personal attack on you.

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 1:46 PM Eli Schwartz via aur-general < aur-general@archlinux.org> wrote:

...

On 07/16/2018 01:47 PM, Shane Simmons via aur-requests wrote:

...

I never received any kind of notification that my account was suspended, or why. As far as I can recall, my best guess would be that it was because I had stupidly published a bug comment to the aurman AUR page and was harshly schooled by the aurman developer that his package depends on a -git package, which had to be installed manually because, again, stupidly, I didn't know that -git packages' PKGBUILDs don't contain the current version, but is instead calculated during install.

If that's why, after I understood the issue I just shrugged and went on with my life, and wasn't aware there was a continuing problem until I tried to push updates. I'm more than happy to push my changes if I can; if it can't be reinstated, though, then I'd at least like to know why, please.

I did that, because of:

" Alad commented on 2018-06-06 12:00 I've already removed scores of spam from this page. The next guy who makes personal attacks or feels entitled to support without using the proper channels as kindly requested by the author will get his account suspended indefinitely. "

And it is rather disingenuous to suggest that you posted *one* comment and then moved on with life. One comment, is the number of comments that weren't deleted. You've got another five comments there that I or alad deleted, which makes four comments (3 deleted) for that *one* issue, and another 2 unrelated but also deleted comments.

...

Now let's consider why you were making all those comments on the AUR page to begin with. It's because you already responded to a closed, explained issue on the developer's Github repository: https://github.com/polygamma/aurman/issues/153#issuecomment-399191472

And you did so in a rude manner, on top of ignoring the resolution (you did not exactly ask for understanding, you merely told the developer he was wrong). He then banned you from his github repo *after explaining yet again*, apparently because he dislikes you and doesn't want to listen to you etc. yadda yadda yadda.[1]

So... you moved over to the AUR and decided to treat that as a means of furthering your campaign of argumentation, after a couple exchanges of which I deleted most of the comments and suspended your AUR account too. Because if people aren't supposed to flood the AUR comments with questions about the upstream development, then that goes triple for using the AUR for the explicit purpose of circumventing the upstream developer's ban policy for their own support medium.

FWIW your account is no longer suspended. But, keep in mind that again there was a pinned comment warning users about the kind of behavior likely to result in suspension.

I don't want to see this sort of hounding again. Picking a misguided fight with people across two websites does not contribute value to the AUR.

(Next time consider politely asking on e.g. aur-general "they say this is supposed to work, but I don't understand how, can some knowledgeable person please explain the concept to me".)

-- Eli Schwartz Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

[1] -- People are welcome to think whatever they wish about developers who practice an over-eager ban policy, as long as they think it somewhere other than the AUR. I also encourage people to read the discussion at https://github.com/polygamma/aurman/issues/140 before passing judgment.

...and all I wanted to do was find out why my account was locked, and possibly get it unlocked so I could update a single package after getting an alert on it, and alternatively have someone mark the package as orphaned if I couldn't. I think I regret my decision. You know, my apologies for not realizing, despite spending loads of time avoiding -git packages, that -git packages don't follow the same packaging guidelines as other packages. I should have known that 'pkgver' wasn't what to pay attention to, but rather I should have reviewed the VCS package guidelines. Seeing the output of 'pacman -Qi expac-git' would have told me that the problem was me, not the package, even though expac-git at the time had a comment on there questioning whether the package's history had been erased. Running into the error and not knowing the solution on my own and not being willing to hunt down the problem but rather posting to aur.archlinux.org in hopes of some guidance from fellow users was surely my sign that I wasn't smart enough to use an AUR helper, and probably that after years of using Arch, that I probably shouldn't even be using Arch. Message received. I mean...I understand where you're coming from, but "users should be turing-complete" is part of why I chose to not use aurman. That's not a ding on them or their work, because it's an awesome package manager, but they take aggro behavior toward users to an extreme. On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 2:31 PM Jagannathan Tiruvallur Eachambadi via aur-general wrote:

If you are using the AUR, you are expected to read and know some things. Not using a AUR helper is a perogative and I don't know what you want to imply by my solution is to not use aurman. To be honest, if you can't install it, you can't use it. -- Regards Jagan PUBKEY: https://j605.tk/pgp

On 07/16/2018 03:19 PM, Shane Simmons via aur-general wrote:

If anyone cares to review the comments, yes, I posted on the git repo, but only because of the admonishment that AUR isn't the place to post bugs on aurman. Or, you could review the comments if they weren't deleted. Part of mine were a plea to just leave the thread up for people who were similarly confused. Request denied, account locked, and a blanket message that peoples' accounts were being suspended for spam.

From: "aurman is broken" "PLEASE check your dependencies. Don't just check pacman on your Dev box" "I mean, it's cute and all that you closed the bug and marked it as invalid, but your package updates itself from the aur, and you have 2.13.1-1 marked as the release version, which depends on expac-git>=8.1.g5ae006f which the maintainer has set to be version 3.9.g7a73405-1 for some reason." to "plea to leave the thread up for people who were similarly confused" Very nice of you to focus so much on the last sentence of your last comment.

Had you simply posted a simple "make sure to install expac-git before upgrading or aurman will complain about broken dependencies" would have avoided having anyone post comments. Had expac-git actually been broken instead of me just not understanding that PKGVER doesn't get updated in a PKGBUILD ;-) relying on a nonexistent package would be a bug, no? ;-) Your response to that was to first post the output of pacman -Qi, then to hurl an insult about how users are turing-complete and I should act like I am. (I'm paraphrasing here because, quite frankly, I can't refer to the deleted comments.) It's not nearly as obvious as you seem to think it is (I generally avoid anything that has -git dependencies), and a simple google search shows that you need guidance sometimes, too. Treat others the way you want to be treated, imho.

My comment about turing-complete users was not deleted. polygamma's comment much earlier that day posting the output of pacman -Qi on the github issues was not deleted. They're two almost unrelated incidents, and my comment only came about in the context of your persistent nudnik behavior.

Anyway, my solution was pretty simple: just stop using aurman. If I'm going to lose access to AUR because my post is deemed Not A Problem, then I can't trust the software.

You did not. You lost access to the AUR because I made a judgment call that you were graduating to outright harassment of polygamma. Arch Linux and the AUR and in fact the internet are full of smart people, stupid people, annoying-but-smart people, annoyingly stupid people, and a variety of other types of "people", a good chunk of which I probably don't want to spend time with and a number of whom are fairly typical "help vampires". Our help forums are fairly well moderated (let's call it that, anyway, lest the ringwraiths who dwell there get angry :p); the AUR is decidedly less so. Most people whose comments have been deleted did not get their account suspended too. I think it's fair to say that this case must have been significantly something aside from just "because my post is deemed Not A Problem". So to get back to a common theme here, maybe, just maybe, the reason you're different is because you weren't just saying something deemed not a problem, but were actually saying something which was deemed a *social problem on your part*?

I didn't go around to various forums posting about how people shouldn't use it; it's a popular AUR helper for a very good reason.

Your *first* comment on Github closed with the sentence: "If you're going to simply close bugs now because you don't want to deal with it, please let us all know so we can find another aur helper."

I fully expect my account will be suspended shortly after I hit Send, and I guess that's fine. I'm not married to Arch, either, which I'll have to stop using because I won't just make packages for myself to keep using Upwork. But just...settle down. Not every non-positive comment is a personal attack on you.

And not every comment that I deleted on that page was accompanied by a suspension. Just the one user who refused to listen when the developer and maintainer told you you were wrong, but kept on insisting that nevertheless he was wrong. Given your acknowledgment that you aren't familiar with -git packages, and given the fact that someone who is familiar enough with them to write an AUR helper around them tells you it will work... why did you spend so much time asserting with serene confidence in your own ultimate correctness that you are right and everyone else is wrong... ... instead of literally just trying to go through with the update as you were advised to *from the very beginning of the beginning*? You started from the very beginning with maximum "I'm right and this AUR helper author is not just wrong, but an incompetent person who thinks he is 'cute' but actually his thing is buggy and he doesn't want to deal with bugs so he should tell his users that so they know they should go find another helper". -- Eli Schwartz Bug Wrangler and Trusted User