[aur-general] Huge packages in community

[Vinzenz Vietzke]

Xyne schrieb:
> 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.
First, I fully agree with your reaction. I think it's really
unprofessional to blame someone else, just because he's "wasting" your
disc space indirectly. Come on, Angel! If that's a problem for you, you
should have known it before you put up an mirror.
> 
> 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.
Don't even think of removing Nexuiz! It's one of the best OSS games and
a really a driving force for people switching to Linux. So moving such
an important programm to AUR wouldn't do Archlinux itself any favor,
especially in the work for public perception!

> 
> 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.
Exactly! That's why a server admin is a server admin and not a developer
or package maintainer!

So long,
vinz

-- 
Vinzenz Vietzke
www.archmirror.de