[aur-general] advice wanted on "surf" package

[Xavier]

On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Ray Kohler <ataraxia937 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm the maintainer of the "surf" package in AUR, and I've discovered
> an annoyance in the way I've created this package. I'd like some
> advice on how to resolve it.
>
> This package is a web browser from suckless.org, the makers of dwm. It
> has very much the same coding and build style, involving a config.h
> file which the user is intended to customize. Most of surf's behavior
> is decided at compile-time by this file. I've modeled my package after
> the "dwm" package in community, copying the default config.h into the
> root of the package tarball and listing it as a local source file.
> build() then copies it into the unpacked source directory before
> compiling.
>
> This is great for users of dwm who rebuild it from ABS, as it avoids
> the need to modify build() in order to customize the package - the
> user just needs to supply their own config.h and change the md5sum for
> it.
>
> This doesn't work so well for my surf package, though, since that's in
> the AUR. Many (most?) users of AUR packages are auto-updating with
> helper-tools like yaourt, pbget, and similar utilities, and it's
> difficult to automatically pull updates to package materials when
> you've changed one of the files. customizepkg won't help you much
> either, since that can only modify the PKGBUILD, and not the config.h.
>
> It's also annoying to me as the maintainer of the package. Anyone who
> maintains a package that's meant to have the build customized, rather
> than compiled as-is, will end up actually maintaining two copies - one
> "stock" version to submit to AUR, and one customized version for
> personal use.
>
> Obviously, none of these issues are show-stoppers. But they are
> annoying, and I don't packages I maintain to annoy my end-users. What
> can I do to make this package more comfortable for the average AUR
> user? Is software that expects compile-time customization just
> fundamentally not very compatible with the auto-update concept?
>

dwm was one of the very few softwares I never used a PKGBUILD for and
don't recommend using one.
And the problem you just described is one of the reasons.