[aur-general] AUR Improvement Thread

[Justin Davis]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Kaiting Chen <kaitocracy at gmail.com> wrote:
> How can we make the AUR even better? I'll start:
>
> 1. Integrated distributed version control system

I like this idea. At least the ability to track changes in PKGBUILDs
would be fun. Similar to a wiki's revision history.

Though a distributed VCS and not a centralized VCS is not really that
necessary I use git mainly because it is fast, not because it is
distributed. So I don't see why a distributed VCS would be any worse
than a centralized one. The AUR is never going to be merging from
another repo anyways... right? It would basically be read-only and
might not even be publicly available as a repository so I don't see
what difference it makes.

You could even go off on a tangent and have AUR maintainers be able to
push to their own git repository on AUR ... muah.

> 2. User provided binaries (if case anyone wants to volunteer) (this should
> probably be carefully controlled)

I don't really see how this fits in. The user can host their own
repository already. I would rather KISS and leave the AUR source only.

> 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)

Good idea. Better statistics could be gathered by simply adding a
timestamp to votes db entries. Maybe pretty graphs too!

> 4. An official client

The unofficial clients do nicely as it is and an official one is not
necessary. Improving the "official" RPC would be nice though.

> 5. LDAP support because LDAP makes everything so much better

LDAP makes everything so much more complicated! I avoid it whenever possible.

-- 
-Justin