[aur-dev] Some notes on AUR 4.0.0

[Lukas Fleischer]

Hi,

As Florian already mentioned in another email, I am away until June 1st.
I am on a roaming data plan, so I won't be able to reply to all the
feedback and questions on the new AUR until then. I hope that I am going
to address at least some of the concerns and questions here, though.

For the granularity of the Git repositories, having one repository per
package (i.e. package base) is a natural choice. The other possibility
is to use one single large repository with branches for each package.
Florian told me about gitnamespaces, which allows for combining the
advantages from both approaches, and I am going to check whether we can
easily use it for the AUR when I am back home. Using one repository per
maintainer, however, is extremely inconvenient and leads to unnecessary
clutter when changing ownership. One of our main objectives is to have
full history of all packages and this means that we would need to
perform quite cumbersome history import/export operations whenever a
package is disowned or adopted. Also, I am not aware of any
disadvantages of the "one repository per package" approach apart from
merges being inconvenient (which happen much less frequent than package
adoptions, however) and the spurious "I don't like many Git
repositories." argument.

As Florian said, using gitnamespaces will probably lead to better
storage efficiency and I am fine with increasing the blob size limit to
250kiB.

As described in the notification draft I sent to aur-dev and aur-general
on Saturday, packages can only be resubmitted to aur4.archlinux.org by
their current AUR maintainer (on aur.archlinux.org) for 4 weeks. That
means that it is *not* possible for user2 to submit the package foobar
to aur4.archlinux.org if it is maintained by user1 on aur.archlinux.org
for that period of time. It *is* possible however, to submit that
package if user1 chose not to resubmit foobar until July 8th. The period
of 4 + 4 weeks is a tradeoff: Making that period shorter means that
users might not have enough time to resubmit their packages, making that
period longer means that the maintenance burden of having to update all
packages twice is higher. Please also keep in mind that the AUR should
be thought of as a place where the community shares packages on a
voluntary basis. You maintain AUR packages because you want to share
them, not because you want to own them. "Losing" a package to another
maintainer isn't the same thing as losing property.

If you have any useful tools or scripts to help with the migration
process, please feel free to add them to the aur4.archlinux.org section
on the wiki.

Regards,
Lukas