[aur-general] storming in for no reason with crazy ideas

[Dieter Plaetinck]

Sebastian Nowicki wrote:
>
> On 22/12/2008, at 2:14 PM, Allan McRae wrote:
>
>>  If we split them, then we (being devs and TUs) need to decide 
>> whether the community packages get shown on the main Arch package 
>> page or are kept separate.
>
> Considering many people have asked for this already, I'd say it would 
> be a good move to have it on the main Arch site. In addition to that, 
> there have been many discussions about (and even work towards) 
> rewriting AUR, and I'm sure this task would be easier if [community] 
> was out of the way (support for binary and PKGBUILD repositories, vs 
> just PKGBUILD repositories).
>
> The only downside to this that I see is the loss of the political 
> separation of community from the official repositories. There always 
> seemed to be a wall between the two, with community being an 
> "unsupported" repository. If this repository shows up on the main 
> website, it would seem as though it is officially supported. I'm not 
> sure how that affects the developers.
>
Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with TU/devtools stuff.

I don't understand why technical changes are considered to be so tightly 
coupled to "political" changes.
Eg why does unifying devtools mean you need to start showing packages on 
the main site?
Why not strive for unifying tools and leave the political stuff a 
separate issue?
I *assume* the reason here is that if you switch community to the 
"normal" repo tools you can't show them on AUR anymore unless you patch 
up aur, so putting them on the main page is the easy workaround?
Can't we make the "backend" of AUR the same as the other repos?
So that unsupported and community become repo's just like core or extra, 
except that for unsupported only the source packages are availabe, not 
the binary packages.
In that fashion, it should be easy to display whichever repo 
(unsupported/community/core/extra) in AUR by toggling a flag, and things 
like acces rights, supporting a repo or not, showing it on the frontpage 
or not become a separate issue, not bound by technical limitations.

If all of this was nonsense, please don't shoot me (see disclaimer above)

Dieter