[aur-general] AUR Improvement Thread

[Thorsten Töpper]

On Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:01:48 -0200
Ángel Velásquez <angvp at archlinux.org> wrote:
> 2010/11/17 Kaiting Chen <kaitocracy at gmail.com>:
> > How can we make the AUR even better? I'll start:
> >
> > 1. Integrated distributed version control system
> +1 but I think distributed is not necessary at all, but keeping the
> revisions of a PKGBUILD or the rest of the files will be nice.

I agree with Ángel a distributed VCS is not the correct choice here, I
love git but for this a central one is the more useful. As I'm not
fully into this either I thought a while about this and came to the
conclusion, that a VCS might be to bloated in general.
As I like the basic idea that it might be useful to keep the last x
tarballs on the server just with growing "revisions" and if the count
is full when a new one is submitted just the oldest one is removed.
The naming scheme could be something like this pkgname.rev.tar.gz I
don't think changing the upload part for that would be much work so if
the idea is welcome I'll implement it (at least try to, don't work much
with web stuff).

> > 2. User provided binaries (if case anyone wants to volunteer) (this
> > should probably be carefully controlled)
> 
> -1 ... if anyone wants to volunteer, they can apply to be a TU.

-1 I agree with Ángel, it's not that hard to become a TU, show that
you're a nice guy, not slacking and trustworthy and you'll most
probably become one.

> 
> > 3. Time-adjusted 'relevance' measure (votes are useful but suck at
> > the same time; nobody cares if a packages was upvoted 9000+ times a
> > million years ago, especially if it's already been obsoleted by
> > something else)
> 
> 0 No comments, maybe we should do one better statistic, number of
> downloads per day or something like.

-1 I think there is a lot of stuff out there which is useful but rarely
gets new releases as the code fits it's specifications even after
several years so for AUR I don't really see a point in that. Same for
the comments for older packages that are used only by few users there
are often old but still helpful comments.

> > 4. An official client
> 
> -1 No, but if point 1 is accomplished you will do your own client for
> handle it :)

-1 We have pacman, for AUR there are scripts you may use when you are
aware of the fact that this is not an official package of the distri-
bution which you are installing right now, else some people might see a
ports or emerge like util in this and we have the accusations if the
stuff produces problems.

> > 5. LDAP support because LDAP makes everything so much better
> 
> 0 LDAP support just for AUR? I thought in LDAP to manage all our
> systems (forums, bbs, wiki, dev/tu backends) -but this requires soo
> manpower-, so I'd like to implement this, but not just for AUR .. and
> it will be good if these ideas goes to AUR2, because having LDAP + a
> VCS system will make a little bit painful the migration process, from
> the actual aur to the new aur. 

0 I'm not familiar with LDAP except some minor information so I can't
say to this proposal.

Thanks for thinking about AUR, tough I don't like most of your
proposals. ;-)

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