[arch-general] A suggestion for the devs regarding rebuilds

[Pierre Chapuis]

Le Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:26:37 +1000,
Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> a écrit :

> So the cause must be... A change in user-base? Maybe just an increase in 
> user-base resulting in more people who think Arch should be done their 
> way and not the Arch way?

That looks obvious to me. Pacman has been working the same way for a
long time, and yet each major rebuild brings more criticism. Most of
them, I suppose, come from users who come from other distributions with
different founding principles.

There was a time (not so far) when if a package didn't work after a
rebuild the users would be told to try to build it using ABS, patch it
if it didn't, send the patch upstream and eventually to Flyspray if
upstream didn't take act. The thing that had to be fought by the devs
was users advising other users to symlink. But that was two-three years
ago, when most Arch users came from a Gentoo / Slackware background.
Now the user base has increased consequently, mostly with users that
come from the Debian / Ubuntu world. No need to look further, really...

Maybe those new users should be reminded that:
  - Arch is not a democracy. Devs decide, users either agree with them
    or go away / fork. Or at least they are expected to send patches.
  - If they came to Arch because it worked better, they should wonder
    why it does. Otherwise, why not use another distribution?

-- 
catwell