[aur-general] Tarball Guidelines

[Xyne]

Kaiting Chen wrote:

> 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.
> 


I basically agree with previous comments to the effect that some extra files
should be allowed in AUR packages provided that they are relatively small.
The validity of inclusion should be determined case by case.

I definitely don't think that mass-spamming the AUR with a bot is the right way
to do it.