[aur-general] Should TU put in [community] packages they use?

[Aaron Schaefer]

On Jan 18, 2008 8:50 AM, bardo <ilbardo at gmail.com> wrote:
> This came to my mind reading the discussion about Sergej, but after
> some thinking I couldn't make up a clear opinion about it, so this
> thread just brings up the question.
>
> There's a few packages I maintain in unsupported that almost nobody
> voted, so I never moved them to [community]. But what if I use them in
> my daily activities? I'm interested in having an up-to-date package,
> so I'd maintain, build and test it anyway... should I share it with
> its (small) user base?
>
>
> Corrado


This is my take...I don't see any down side to including the packages
in community.  I suppose you could say that bandwidth on the mirrors
would be one, but that's about it.  People are arguing that the AUR
should be run like to official repositories where the devs ask the
other devs if it's okay to add packages to extra/core, but their
reasoning for the recent cleanup and rules regarding that aspect are
because those two repos define Arch Linux as a distribution.  That's
not really the case with community.

Even if only a few people are voting for the packages, like Corrado
said, the TU is doing the work anyway, so why not let everyone benefit
from it since downloading/installing from the community repo is a lot
easier for everyone than building from a PKGBUILD, especially if
you're not familiar with building from source. Plus votes might not be
an accurate portrayal of usage, if you consider that many times
dependencies of a popular package might not have nearly as many votes
as the package that requires them, but I'd still put them in the same
repo for convenience.

Yes, the TUs should be helping to move popular packages in to
community as well, but ideally it would be a package that they are
interested in using themselves so they actually will be able to test
and use it themselves rather than just knowing that it built without
errors.  I think Allesio made that point very well.


Aaron "ElasticDog" Schaefer
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