[aur-general] [community] repository cleanup

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from Heiko Baums's message of 2010-11-16 15:02:19 +0100:
> Am Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:27:50 +0800
> schrieb Ng Oon-Ee <ngoonee at gmail.com>:
> 
> > I thought this idea of Heiko's was a great idea, myself. In a fit of
> > inspiration, here's a suggestion. This would be placed after the last
> > sentence of the 2nd paragraph in the 3-paragraph description.
> > 
> > "This community involvement allows developers to focus on what's most
> > important to them in the knowledge that the community will provide
> > high quality packages for everything else."
> 
> Maybe there should be added that Arch Linux is only a distro from its
> devs for its devs and not from the community for the community.
> 
> I wish you wouldn't add such a paragraph. Instead the ignorance of some
> devs should be removed. That was the better way.
> 
> > And Heiko, I'm not sure why you're making a big fuss over these
> > packages. Its not even much harder to work from the AUR. Comparisons
> > to Gentoo are ridiculous. I've got 75 packages from the AUR
> > currently, and I don't spend hours a day compiling. The longest
> > package to compile is probably samba4 at 20 minutes, followed by the
> > kernel at 10 minutes (optimized), everything else tops out at 1-2
> > minutes. Go have a cup of coffee, and consider the difference to the
> > hours and hours you'd have spent compiling world on Gentoo.
> 
> I already used Gentoo for 6 years. So I know what that compiling means.
> That's why I was looking for a binary distro in the style of Gentoo.
> That's why I came to Arch Linux 3 or 4 years ago.
> 
> And the more small packages need to be compiled from AUR the more time
> it takes compiling them. Many a little makes a mickle.

It's not at all about compile times IMHO but about the effort necessary
to keeping source packages up-to-date. Doing this manually would be a
major PITA for even a relatively small number of packages. AUR helpers
like slurpy help a bit, but the required effort is still significantly
higher than with binary packages. How much effort it requires depends
IMHO almost entirely on the number of packages.

JFYI I currently maintain 89 AUR packages and have probably about 180
AUR packages from other maintainers installed. There is does mean effort,
believe me or not.

> My main problems are this mass cleanup and the ignorant responses I get
> from some devs to such remarks or to some bug reports etc.
> 
> That's why I make such a fuss.
> 
> Heiko
>