[aur-general] Source code for community packages.

[Eric Bélanger]

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 8:34 PM, Xyne<xyne at archlinux.ca> wrote:
> A small public repo of compiled AUR packages reminded me of something.
>
> What's the official policy for providing source code for GPL'd binary
> packages in [community]? I know there was a long discussion about this
> with some phraknagging eventually leading to a source "repository" for
> core and maybe extra. Although it would most likely never happen it is
> possible for someone to show up after nearly 3 years and request a
> previous package's source code.
>
> I suppose that previously the devs could argue that [community] was "not
> official" and relegate all obligations to the packagers (although only
> tentatively). Now that [community] is integrated more tightly with
> [core] and [extra] it seems that this is something at least worth a
> discussion.

We will definitely create sourceballs for (L)GPL2 community packages.
We were waiting for the svn switch for the community repo because the
sourceball script is using svn to get package information.  The
community repo support was added in the dbscripts git. We just need to
update the dbscripts on the server. Meanwhile, TU should check that
their package have the license specified.

>
> How are sources for [core] and [extra] handled?
> How is the user actually informed of their availability?
> Are those source archives mirrored or only hosted on the main server?
> Is this all irrelevant due to some misunderstanding of the GPL's
> clauses?
> How much storage space would it take to hose source files for all
> current packages that require them (e.g. GPL'd binary apps)?
>

We host sourceballs of the  (L)GPL2  (and custom license that requires
it) packages that are currently in the core/extra/testing repo. Users
can get them here: ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/sources/
I believe mirrors can sync them at their option so your mirror might
have them as well.  IIRC, technically they should also host the
sources but we are not enforcing it.
When a package is updated, the old source is removed and replaced by
the newer one. They currently take 20GB  of disk space.  That will
probably increase of several GB once we do it for the community repo.
I hope I answered all your questions.

Eric