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

[Darwin Bautista]

On Jan 19, 2008 4:08 AM, Aaron Schaefer <aaron at elasticdog.com> wrote:
> 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.

But the AUR Trusted User Guidelines says otherwise. Ideally,
"... He/she maintains popular packages, ..."

"A TU may adopt any package at any time. But because the TU's time is
limited, he should try to only adopt popular packages. The voting
mechanism in the AUR allows a TU to quickly gauge which packages users
want."

>From the guidelines in the wiki, I can only conclude that TUs have the
duty to adopt and maintain popular packages (nothing is said about
'personal' packages though). Of course, I might be wrong if the
guidelines in the wiki are already outdated or are no longer
applicable/used. Lastly, the last line, "The voting mechanism in the
AUR allows a TU to quickly gauge which packages users want." suggests
that TUs should also consider what the users want (maybe that's the
reason why the repo was named 'community').

-- 
Darwin M. Bautista
BS Electronics and Communications Engineering
University of the Philippines Diliman
http://www.darwin.uk.to

University of the Philippines Linux Users' Group
http://www.uplug.org