[aur-general] [arch-dev-public] Breaking the unspoken rule: AUR helper in [community]

[dave reisner]

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 9:16 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/cower/
>
> Thoughts? I was under the impression we didn't do this, and definitely
> on purpose, otherwise people have *no* idea the AUR is different in a
> lot of ways. Making people go the "hard way" to get a helper installed
> at least presents some (necessary) barrier.
>
> -Dan
>

I suppose it depends on what we want the barrier to be. In lieu of one of
Xyne's flowcharts, consider the raw interaction with the AUR to be something
like:

search -> download -> extract -> makepkg -> pacman

cower draws the line after extraction, because I consider the process to be
trivial up until that point. A completely uninformed user who learns how to
use the AUR website and/or cower is still left in the same position after
extraction -- they have some strange text files on their hard drive. A
monkey* could get this far. The responsibility still lies with the user to
understand what they've downloaded and what needs to be done with those
files. makepkg, and the understanding of, is too important to be masked by
another program.

I do, however, understand the concern that existance of a tool in community
to fetch said strange files may make them appear to be more supported than
unsupported.

dave

* a real monkey, not one of our users.