[aur-dev] Git repos for AUR packages

[郑文辉(Techlive Zheng)]

2014/1/7 Lukas Fleischer <archlinux at cryptocrack.de>:
> Hi,
>
> I think the idea of integrating Git with the AUR [1] is a very good one
> and should be a milestone for the 3.0.0 release. The idea is to create a
> Git repository per package.
>
> Pros:
>
> * Full history of each AUR package, even if the maintainer changes.
>
> * Lays the foundations for supporting multiple maintainers per package.
>
> * Makes it easier to contribute patches (see git-format-patch(1),
>   branches and pull requests).
>
> * cgit might do quite a lot of the work required on the front-end side.
>   PKGBUILD previews, history view, tarball generation, Git clone
>   support, ...
>
> * Updating packages will be easier (`git pull` followed by `makepkg -i`
>   instead of doing all the work from the web browser or via an AUR
>   helper).
>
> Cons:
>
> * Needs more space on the AUR server. Currently, an AUR package uses
>   ~17KiB on the official Arch Linux AUR server. This will probably
>   increase by a factor of 10. Shouldn't be too problematic unless we get
>   a lot of new packages or a lot of updates.
>
> * More load on the AUR server. Especially if we no longer store tarballs
>   but use cgit to generate them on the fly (needs to be discussed).
>
> Migration should be easy since we can use a small shell script to
> convert all packages into Git repositories.
>
> The first idea is to slightly change the package submission process to
> extract the whole tarball, parse the PKGBUILD and do a Git commit with
> the tarball content. There will be an additional text field to enter a
> (part of the) commit message that is used. As mentioned above, all
> package repositories will be accessible via cgit. The PKGBUILD preview
> (and maybe also the tarball download) will be replaced with a simple
> link to cgit.
>
> Later, we should think of how to support support for git-push(1). The
> main issues are
>
> * Authentication: Virtual accounts, somehow connected to the AUR DB?
> * Integration of the PKGBUILD/.AURINFO parser: Git hook?
> * DoS protection: Quotas, ...
>
> Any comments and suggestions are welcome!
>
> Regards,
> Lukas
>
> [1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/23010

Yes, integrating Git into AUR is good, really good, but if we are
going to do it, we need to do it the right way.

Here are some thoughts:

1. The official Git URL for a AUR package is like this:
http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/xyz.git or
http://git.aur.archlinux.org/packages/xyz.git.

2. Each AUR user should be able to have its own fork of a perticular
AUR package with a URL like this:
http://aur.archlinux.org/account/john/packages/xyz.git.

3. The official Git HEAD for a AUR package is actually just a Git
reference to maintainer's fork's HEAD, we just need to change this Git
reference if the maintainer changes. Each fork of a package should
have its of votes which could be used to determine the maintainer for
the official AUR package. And the on the official AUR package's PAGE,
all the forks and their votes should be listed for the user to choose.

This way, the job to maintain AUR will be more community driven, and
the burden for TUs will be much less.