On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 11:35 PM, Christopher Reimer <mail@creimer.net> wrote:

Hi list,

I'm maintainer of a project called VDR4Arch. https://github.com/VDR4Arch/vdr4arch

I recently started taking over a bunch of packages in AUR. My main goal is to follow the best practices from the Developer Wiki as good as possible.

A lot of plugins for vdr are more or less orphaned upstream. There are no regular releases and the last one is usually a year back. However there are still commit in the GIt repository. And around the vdr community it's common practice to use these Git revisions and consider them stable. The community even keeps these plugins alive with compatibility patches.

Usually I would say that these are VCS packages and need to be suffixed by -git. But to distribute the version everyone in the community expects I started using the VCS feature with fixed commit ids, which are tested by me or somebody trusted. I create these packages without the -git suffix.

I'd like to know how a Trusted User or even an Arch Developer would handle this. Is this approach acceptable?

-git packages are expected to track the latest development (usually the master branch), generating a dynamically versioned package from the head commit. If you lock your releases to certain commits or tags, it's not fundamentally different from a package using tarballs. If you grep ABS for '#\(tag\|commit\|revision\)=' you'll find a lot of packages grabbing sources from bzr, git or svn.