[arch-ports] going to start a new ArchLinux?

[Roman Kyrylych]

2007/5/9, Calorì Alessandro <axelgenus at gmail.com>:
> Il giorno Wed, 9 May 2007 17:08:24 +0300
> "Roman Kyrylych" <roman.kyrylych at gmail.com> ha scritto:
>
> > To become TU you need only to post short introduction message to
> > tur-users ML. The procedure of becoming a TU is not that hard, really
> > (though, I must confess I was a bit scary to write my
> > introduction :-) ) BTW, what's your AUR login?
>
> I'm an Arch user from just about 1 month and an Arch64 user from
> two weeks but I'm a linux user since 2004... my nick in AUR is
> "axelgenus".
>
> However, I read the "requisites" to be a TU and they are somewhat
> discouraging... I mean:
>
> 1) maintain packages on community repo, yes of course but what
> packages? The best and more useful packages are owned by TUs... Now I'm
> writing a PKGBUILD for Neverwinter Nights' linux client but how many
> people will find it useful? It needs to download about 1GB from the
> bioware server (client + game resources).
>
> 2) be well regarded by the comunity... ok, that's obvious but how can I
> achieve this? I've been a Gentoo user for 2 years and I can't remember
> just one nick of the people who helped me on the forums... I hope
> italian users like me find the translations I'm going to do on the wiki
> useful.
>
> 3) be prepared to stay six months in the TU position... I've never made
> such long-term programs! If I become a TU is because I wanted to... why
> should I be forced to stay in TU position?
>

Hmm, I cannot find such text anywhere.
Where did you read this?
In fact, in order to become a TU nothing of the above is required.
TUs should just know that you have enough skills for package building,
porting and fixing (applying x86_64 specific patches etc.) and to vote
"yes" for you.
Having some packages is not _required_, there are other ways to show
your skills.
You can find a sponsor before or after the introductory message to
tur-users ML (usually someone volunteers to sponsor a candidate).
If at least one TU (your sponsor) finds you a good candidate, the
discussion period and voting procedure begins.

> > That could be also archieved by offloading many uncommon packages to
> > Community repo.
>
> That's a great idea but I would like the package in community repo to
> be assigned both to the maintainer and the contributor. Example: I
> write the PKGBUILD for the program "foo"; if it's moved to community I
> can't continue to maintain the package because I'm not a TU. This
> only adds more work to TUs!
That's about CVS/SVN/whatever access rights.
Also, often a package in unsupported has many contributors over time,
because people orphan and readopt it.
You can send updated PKGBUILDs to maintainer directly or post in comments.
Posting PKGBUILD as a comment (after TU adopted it) doesn't differ
much from uploading new version to unsupported (before adoption).

>
> > On the other hand it would be very good if some existent TUs become
> > devs (and give out their packages and switched to maintaining official
> > repos only, to reduce workload).
>
> I don't actually know how are devs and TU organized yet but I can
> suggest you one thing: as I said before it would be very useful if a
> contributor can maintain a package after it's added to the community
> repo. The maintainer should only watch over some contributors revising their work.

See above.
BTW, there are cases where non-devs/non-TUs send updated patches that
devs/TUs just review and commit to CVS.

>
> However: why packages are builded manually? Can't they be builded
> automatically on some dedicated servers (at least one for each arch).

Pacbuild is on the way.

-- 
Roman Kyrylych (Роман Кирилич)