[arch-general] How do AUR packages get new maintainers?

[Myra Nelson]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 20:23, Steve Holmes <steve.holmes88 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Yeah, when I got started into learning package maintenance in Arch, I
> recall reading the wiki pages for AUR and ABS (the Arch Build
> System).  Sorry, I forget the exact links but the ABS stuff explains
> PKGBUILDs really well and when I combined that with the AUR material,
> I felt I was pretty will informed to start digging in and start
> playing around with some PKGBUILDs I was interested in and then I took
> on a couple packages that I was personally interested in maintaining.
> I also have download some other packages that are only in AUR and I
> built them on my own system in a /var/abs/local path so that also gave
> me more self learned experience with packages and how these things
> should be built.  Probably the area needing most attention paid to is
> the standards that should be followed when building new PKGBUILDs.  Of
> course, like most of us programmers tend to do, we can just copy other
> PKGBUILDS and work from them; just hope they are well behaved or we
> would be creating more bad packages from other bad ones <smile>.  But
> then there's the .proto PKGBUILDs and install scripts that come with
> the ABS package (if I remember right) that are good starters too.
>
> Anyway, I rambled on here for a long time and probably caused even
> more confusion but hopefully, this was of some value.
>


Like Steve, I used the same method of learning about PKGBUILDS, ABS, and the
AUR.
One thing which made me determined to figure it out, without additional
help, was the
possibility of responses similar to what David seems to incur. Because there
are times
when my dementia (this is not a joke) keeps me from finding answers that are
right in
front of my face and I just can't put it all together.

One question to ask one's self comes from this premise; I'm a busy developer
or programmer
and I don't like all the BS on my mailing list so I'm going to ride hard on
someone who asks what
I think are silly questions when they could find out for themselves. The
flip side is, when you have
a question about a legal problem will you spend hours researching it, or
call a lawyer. What if the
lawyer tells you to read the wiki, STFW, or RTFM.

Since lawyers tend to be fairly busy in today's world, or so it seems, maybe
he feels he can
get a quick hint, get back to work, then have some context to work with when
he does his
research later. Another analogy would be when you've got a fever of 103 deg
F (39.4 deg C)
and the doctor tells you to take 2 aspirin, hands you a medical journal to
read, and see if you
can reach me in the morning.

I agree useless noise on the mailing list is aggravating. What's more
aggravating is after several
responses (positive or negative) a 20 - now 21- barrage of responses. Many
of which just
continue to elicit responses which are nothing but some form of
regurgitation of what's gone
before.

As a suggestion for those of you who don't care for David's question, don't
open his posts and
read them. It might make for a more civil world. I also have a short quick
fuse and tend
to put out responses to attacks as a personal affront. I'll break my machine
and have to
reinstall the whole system before I ask a question about how to fix
anything, even if it's cutting
my nose off to spite my face.

One would hope this is enough to end the BS, it's getting tiring.

Myra Nelson


-- 
Life's fun when your sick and psychotic!