[aur-general] Tarball Guidelines

[Kaiting Chen]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 9:25 PM, Heiko Baums <lists at baums-on-web.de> wrote:

> Am Mon, 6 Dec 2010 21:02:00 -0500
> schrieb Loui Chang <louipc.ist at gmail.com>:
>
> > I might be kind of crazy here, but maybe desktop files and icons are
> > things that should be distributed from upstream. So maintainers should
> > work to get those included like a patch or whatnot.
>
> I generally agree, but not every upstream does include desktop files
> and it's not possible for packages which aren't maintained by upstream
> anymore.
>
> We already had this discussion on the mailing lists. So this should be
> handled quite flexible in AUR as well as in the repos.
>
> You won't get the ideal in this point.
>

In the official repositories we don't include these files generally. I think
the AUR should be the place where maintainers can choose to include these
files if they want. There are all kinds of PKGBUILD's in [unsupported] with
all kinds of crazy patches. And including a *.desktop file that upstream
doesn't include is essentially a patch. So if we're going to say that AUR
PKGBUILD's should not include *.desktop files then we might as well say that
AUR PKGBUILD's should not include patches.

And if we're going to go with this level of communism then we might as well
say that -svn, -git, etc. PKGBUILD's don't belong in [unsupported] because a
development branch is basically a series of unofficially released patches.
And if we do that we might as well scrap the whole AUR.

On the other hand for [core], [extra], and [community] users expect a high
level of standardization and QA. Therefore in my opinion things like
*.desktop files and patches NEVER belong there except when critically
necessary.

Let me summarize: [unsupported] is not official so we should only suggest
not enforce; [core], [extra], [community] are official and we should enforce
our policy to the fullest extent. --Kaiting.

-- 
Kiwis and Limes: http://kaitocracy.blogspot.com/