[aur-general] Packages in Community and votes.

[Loui Chang]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 09:31:17AM -0700, w9ya wrote:
> I do NOT normally comment here and certainly NOT with the tone I am about to
> use. But you guys (plural) are attempting to dictate binding discussions
> without first doing your own due diligence. Or you are asking me and others
> to do your due diligence for you? This is, of course, very troubling to me.
> It should be to other TUs too.

Past discussions are less relevant because they don't have the same
effects as the problems we face today. 

> It is NOT a given that the voting statistics are accurate or even
> "..somewhat accurate". MANY reasons have been given in the past why such
> accuracy is not possible under the current voting scheme, so I again ask you
> to do your due diligence, i.e. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do a search on
> previous discussions about this that have taken place (repeatedly) over (at
> least) the last couple of years.

Nothing in life is a given, but we make conclusions based in empirical
data. This is how decisions are made to improve things. It's what drives
advancement.

> I know for a *FACT* that many of my packages are used, some VERY heavily and
> by MANY users and yet have NO votes. I will give you here but two of the
> several reasons;

> 1 - I maintain an offshoot version of archlinux, derived from faunos, called
> "shackstick". It is used and is becoming quite popular amongst the ham radio
> community. It is packaged as a whole and the user does NOT download packages
> or even is part of the arch linux community, so NO votes are taken. Yet it
> uses over 25 of my packages that would seem to otherwise be without votes.

If your community cares about the packages that are provided in
[community] they should vote. Voting wasn't put in the AUR for absolutely
no reason. If someone doesn't vote for a package then I would assume
that it isn't all that important if the package is in community or not.

If your users don't even download the packages then there is no point
for those packages to be in community.

> 2 - Since the votes are NOT reflective of downloads, and for the above
> reason downloads are NOT reflective of the numbers of users, and FURTHER
> many users do NOT vote, there can be NO correlation between votes and usage.
> It isn't even a rough estimate.

It is a rough estimate. Please review the pkgstats results.

Furthermore you're making it sound like moving a package from
community is some kind of travesty, like it will disappear.

No. You can still maintain it in unsupported, and you can still run your
own repo like the fine folks running the arch-games repo.

Also, maybe you should recommend server upgrades to your offshoot distro
so you're able to host your own niche repo instead of telling Arch to
serve people who don't even want to participate in the community.