[aur-general] Huge packages in community

[Xyne]

> Hi,
> 
> I've syncing my home repo today (like I've been doing since months
> ago) and I got irritated downloading 595 mb of nexuiz, come on, this
> package can be popular or whatever, but IMHO having a 595mb package on
> the repos will be painful.
> 
> I propose for a motion to remove packages like games > 250 mb, I am
> not a TU anymore and I know that, but the waste of bandwith
> downloading games is *really* killer... A solution could be:
> 
> a) Creating an official repo called [games] or something like, where
> TUs and Devs can put games there (huge games principally.
> 
> b) Definetively not upload games to the repos
> 
> I am the administrator of two official mirrors, and watching this
> situation I am really worried if packages > 250 mb (games) will be
> downloaded / updated eventually and I will have to waste GBs on this.
> 
> Please don't take this personal, but IIRC "Gerolde" was suffering for
> the lack of space months ago, and even if this package and those huge
> popular games > 250 mb doesn't merely to be on the official repos,
> frankly (but thanks for the effort to waste the disk space Xyne!).
> 
> Anyway, that's my humble opinion.

First off I would like to say that I took over Nexuiz from another TU
so it was not my decision to upload it to community originally.
Nevertheless I found your comment "but thanks for the effort to waste
the disk space Xyne!" to be rude at best and left me wanting to insert
several four-letter words in this reply.

Also, according to the statistics page, Nexuiz is in the top 7% of
installed community packages, so its inclusion in community is
appreciated by the users.

That said, the size of the Nexuiz package is largely due to the game
data itself (textures, maps, etc) and the 3 compiled binaries in the
package are small enough (in that they compile easily and quickly) that
it would make little difference to a user who had to build the package
himself. If other TUs agree that this package would be better off in
the AUR, I will move it there and continue to maintain it (which would
save me the 2x600MB upload of the binary package which takes hours with
my connection). The issue that I see with this is that it Nexuiz would
not longer enjoy any sort of "official" support from Arch and new users
who are not yet familiar with the AUR may be left with the impression
that it is not readily available. Considering the overall popularity of
Nexuiz within the Linux community, this make leave a bad impression
with some users.

In general though I do not agree with the idea of removing larger
packages simply because the server admin of a given mirror does not
feel that they are worth his effort and bandwidth.

Regards,
Xyne