[arch-general] Intro + package maintenance

[Loui Chang]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 04:34:24PM +0530, aashiks wrote:
> My name is Aashik and i have been using Arch for the last two days. I was 
> planning to simply try it, but decided to stick with it because i like its 
> simplicity. Only one annoying thing happened to me.
> 
> I am from India and my mother tongue is Malayalam. I tried to use scim and 
> m17n version of malayalam input methods. There were a few glitches. I noticed 
> that it is out of date and is currently flagged as  'orphan' when you do a 
> package search. To be precise, 
> the following packages.
> 
> m17n-db,m17n-lib,scim-m17n
> 
> There have been some commits made in the last few months from a project called 
> SMC ( http://smc.org.in ) which enables phonetic text input in Malayalam via 
> m17n also. 
> 
> I did not file a bug report because it asks everyone not to report outdated 
> packages as bugs.Is anyone actively maintaining i686 these packages ? If not I 
> can do it. I have spare time ( i took some time off from work ) . I don't know 
> a thing about creating packages and things like that.  If someone can answer 
> my questions and doubts as they pop up , I can take up this task. 

Hey Aashik,
If you're interested you can fetch the build files for your packages
with `abs repo/pkg`. Copy those files somewhere for building, modify
them, and run makepkg to build your packages. Have a look at these pages
for more detailed info on the process. Cheers!

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ABS
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_User_Guidelines
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Packaging_Standards