[arch-general] We want to help

[Thomas Dziedzic]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 9:33 AM, C Anthony Risinger <anthony at extof.me> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 1:09 AM, Alexander Duscheleit
> <jinks at archlinux.us> wrote:
>> On Tue, 14 Dec 2010 12:12:46 -0600
>> C Anthony Risinger <anthony at extof.me> wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 7:14 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>
>>> wrote:
>>> >>  * git://ius.student.utwente.nl/aur2 -- Thralas's repository
>>> >>  * git://git.berlios.de/aur2 -- Djszapi's repository
>>> >>  * git://github.com/SpeedVin/aur2.git -- SpeedVin's AUR2 forked
>>> >> repo with some patches and translation's.
>>> >
>>> > I'll add "AUR3" to the mix... -
>>> > https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=99839
>>>
>>> i haven't made any release or update to BBS (or README :-) in some
>>> time, but a fair amount of work + thought has gone into this.  if
>>> you'd like, check out the 'pmvc-refactor' branch here:
>>>
>>> https://github.com/extofme/aur-pyjs/tree/pmvc-refactor
>>>
>>> it will be the path forward, and is based on the lightweight puremvc
>>> framework to add a little sanity.  i encourage you to take a look, as
>>> the code is remarkably small, fast, free of any HTML/compatibility
>>> nuances, but still leverages the full power of the most advanced GUI
>>> available... a web browser, an excellent language... python, and a
>>> competent widget library based on GWT.  it's a fully client side
>>> javascript (or python-DOM) application requiring nothing from the
>>> server (or a local daemon...) other than JSON-RPC endpoints, which can
>>> be implemented in any language.
>>> [...]
>>
>> Just out of curiosity, how will this accommodate links/lynx or
>> brltty/espeak/etc. users?
>
> it would not i suppose -- someone else would need to create a front
> end that renders static HTML.  the rest of the code and library could
> be reused... i don't have much interest in implementing that, but i do
> plan to work on a CLI interface once other aspects have been
> completed, so that would be an option too.
>
> the frontends speak with a local JSON-RPC daemon, so really it can be
> anything (in fact one of my super secret awesomo goals is to wire a
> visualizer to the daemon once it's distributed, and visualize the
> Archlinux network).
>
> i'm about to have a whole lotta time freed up, so i'll finally be able
> to work on this again... this project's on my mind everyday and it
> annoys me when i can't work on it :-)
>
> C Anthony
>

If you guys are willing to work on any part of the code in the aur,
there are 3 things that I have always found missing in the aur which I
think are essential.

FS#15043 - Need better parsing of PKGBUILDs
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/15043?project=2
Does this need explaining? It's also pretty annoying.
There are tons of examples on the aur where download sources are like
http://foo.com/foo-{pkgver:0:5.tar.gz
The above example isn't the only thing that is bad at being parsed,
check out bug report for full details.

FS#16394 - Split Packages in AUR
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/16394?project=2
Obviously things like mesa would greatly benefit from this. Also would
allow us to remove a lot of redundant packages.

FS#21600 - canonical links
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/21600?project=2
Although this isn't a necessity, and should probably get low priority,
I think this would be a nice addition. It would make links to the aur
human understandable.

Well hope you take what I said into some consideration.
Cheers!