[arch-dev-public] Where [erxtra] ends and [community] begins

[Aaron Griffin]

On 10/14/07, Pierre Schmitz <pierre at archlinux.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> after the creation of the [core] repository and the cleanup of old [current]
> it should be clear which packages should be in [core] and which don't.
>
> But the border between [extra] and [community] does not seem to be that sharp.
> Does [extra] only include the most important and essential packages? Is
> [community] only a playground and a repo full of alpha releases?
>
> Defining [extra] in a clear way should make it easier to cleanup this repo,
> too. We still have a lot of unmaintained or outdated packages.


I see a lot of people defining the difference here as "official" and
"unofficial" packages.

Personally, I think that is slightly rude to the TUs. It's like saying
"you guys aren't as good as us" or "our packages are better". This
just isn't the case.

While I don't like this distinction, it's pretty much the only one we have.
The way I look at it, is simple popularity. A package goes from
unsupported to community, then community to extra. This is the way
we've done a few things.

What I don't like, however, is stuff floating in extra that only 3 or
4 people use. That's a little silly.

If you were to ask me, I would define extra as "a set of packages that
are either necessary to any modern linux distro (apache, X11, etc etc)
OR are popular enough to warrant official developer oversight".