[aur-general] Aurphan in community

[Loui Chang]

On Sat 30 Apr 2011 09:39 +0300, Grigorios Bouzakis wrote:
> Loui Chang wrote:
> > On Fri 29 Apr 2011 21:49 -0400, keenerd wrote:
> >> I would like to move Aurphan into community.  I've added a number of
> >> features to it lately, and it has become an automated means of
> >> answering "what can I do to help Arch", parsing and summarizing the
> >> todo list, the bugtracker and the orphans.  The one random dev I've
> >> asked seems cool with it, however he thought a wider consensus should
> >> be found.  It has enough votes but....
> >>
> >> Aurphan could be considered an AUR helper.  By default it searches the
> >> AUR for AUR packages you already have installed.  It does not download
> >> anything.
> >>
> >> I will change it so the default behavior does not search the AUR.
> >> (New default would display the --help)  I won't change the name, on
> >> account of it being cute.
> >
> >> aur page: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=43726
> >> project page: http://kmkeen.com/aurphan/
> >
> > This script seems like a really nice idea, but if it deals with
> > unsupported packages it should remain in that domain. Maybe move the
> > functionality that deals with unsupported into an add-on that you can
> > install separately?
> 
> Didn't the extremely popular powerpill also have support for the AUR?
> Although i had never used it, i seem to recall it did, and it was in
> community.

Powerpill was always a pacman wrapper that had no interface to the AUR.
You could however install an add-on called bauerbill which would give
you functionality with the AUR.

Though aurbuild did briefly make its appearance into [community] many
years ago, it was quickly removed for obvious reasons. The only official
client for the AUR that remained for any time was called aurtools and it
was part of the system that TUs used for submitting binary packages to
[community] only.

> Also from your reply on [0] and particularly the "Functionality needs to
> be moved to the clients for the better future of the AUR." part, i got
> the impression that the TU's might actually be considering creating or
> baptising an AUR client official pretty soon.

I did kind of think that it might be a good idea to have a minimal
official client, but that's no longer the case. Arch has no official
client for you to utilize its web service, nor its email service. I'll
maintain there should be no official client for the AUR either. Maybe a
minimal reference client could be useful for testing purposes though.

> The AUR isn't usable 100% from the web interface like it was before
> and users are pratically forced to use one of the many

The web interface seems to work perfectly fine for me.