Hi all,
I noticed in the archlinux general mailing list that a package has been removed from community because the maintainer wasn't active anymore, but the package was not moved to AUR. I decided that this might be a nice first step in becoming a package maintainer in the AUR. But I have a few questions before I submit something that would be below the AUR standards. By the way, the package is called Dasher [1].
The last stable release (4.11) of Dasher is from six years ago. However, the package seems to be maintained, the last commit to the Gnome hosted repository [2] is two weeks ago. So I presume it would be the smartest to release it from git. But then the package would be called dasher-git, I presume? I can also go back a few commits before, to 5.0 beta, but that doesn't build. That has been fixed a commit later. What commit would you use to publish the package?
I can also just copy and paste the PKGBUILD from svntogit [3] before it was removed from community, that uses the latest alpha build, but to me it makes more sense to go to either beta (which doesn't build) or the latest from master.
I hope some experienced AUR maintainers can give me their thoughts about this to make my first AUR package a success.
Greetings, Henk te Sligte
[1] http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ [2] https://git.gnome.org/browse/dasher/ [3] https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/dasher/trunk?id=c819de8...
On 07/31/2016 01:21 PM, Henk te Sligte wrote:
The last stable release (4.11) of Dasher is from six years ago. However, the package seems to be maintained, the last commit to the Gnome hosted repository [2] is two weeks ago. So I presume it would be the smartest to release it from git. But then the package would be called dasher-git, I presume? I can also go back a few commits before, to 5.0 beta, but that doesn't build. That has been fixed a commit later. What commit would you use to publish the package?
Well, there is nothing wrong with publishing a *-git package as well, certainly. Some people like the stable releases, some people like pulling from git HEAD.
In general, you should go with whatever upstream tagged as a release, but in cases where upstream isn't really publishing releases and there are changes you want, IMHO the maintainer can go with whatever they feel is best.
e.g. the trash-cli package in community, which I maintained for a while in the AUR before Pierre Neidhardt adopted it in the repos. Upstream development is more or less dead, so I was just grabbing the most recent commit directly, and resolved to update it every once in a while if I felt there was something new worth it (not that there was, really).
aur-general@lists.archlinux.org