[aur-general] AUR and unsuported architectures

[Baptiste]

On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 09:56:40AM -0300, Hugo Osvaldo Barrera wrote:
> On 2012-05-31 08:10, Phillip Smith wrote:
> > On 31 May 2012 17:38, Jelle van der Waa <jelle at vdwaa.nl> wrote:
> >> When I first though about it, I wanted to say "why not", it doesn't hurt
> >> the functioning of the normal i686,x86_64 packages.
> > 
> > I thought the same, but after thinking more... While AUR is
> > "unsupported", the project/site is still an official item.
> > 
> > In my mind, it doesn't make sense to include unofficial platforms in
> > official infrastructure, supported or not.
> > 
> > We don't encourage documentation of other platforms in our wiki (do we?)
> 
> While I'd wish this weren't true, your argument does make perfect sense,
> so I guess it's best to keep AUR clear of these architectures.
> 
> It may be a bit of chicken-and-egg, though.  The ppc/arm userbase might
> grow if arch is seen stable enough and seems to have sufficient
> packages, possibly making it worth being supported, but the lack of
> infrastructure won't make that so possible.

Another possibility is that somebody in the ARM/PPC community steps up
and reuse the AUR code (afair, it's GPL) to host a specific user
repository for ARM/PPC/whatever.

That would clearly separate it from the current AUR.

However, it requires that somebody spends time to set it up and
maintain it afterwards.

This probably also means that some PKGBUILDs would be available on
both user repositories. I'm not sure it's such a good idea, since this
would lead to more separation between the communities (e.g. PKGBUILD
updates being applied differently on both repos, preventing a --
hypothetical as of now -- future merge to be conducted seamlessly).

On the other hands, for the moment being, many AUR maintainers do not
have the hardware / time / will to support other architectures.

> In any case, it's good to know the official stance so I know what to do
> in these sort of cases.
> 
> Thanks,