[aur-general] Misconceptions about the AUR?

[Heiko Baums]

Am Fri, 2 Mar 2012 17:16:16 -0500
schrieb Loui Chang <louipc.ist at gmail.com>:

> First of all I'll deplore you for hijacking György's TU Application
> thread to rant about your own qualms. You should be ashamed. You
> should apologise. You are wrong.

I'm not wrong, I didn't hijack anything, and I didn't rant. I gave my
concerns about György's TU application and explained them. Afterwards I
just answered some not so nice reactions and kept giving my arguments.
So nothing to be ashamed, nothing to apologise. And, no, I'm not wrong.
Just because you say so?

Like I already said, give some factual and reasonable arguments. You,
too, didn't give even one.

> Secondly. If a PKGBUILD can be built with makepkg then it IS a valid
> PKGBUILD. No matter what you say. If an AUR helper cannot process it,
> then there is a problem with the AUR helper, not the AUR and not the
> PKGBUILD.

Also wrong. If a PKGBUILD has no syntax errors does not mean that it is
valid resp. good. See my example of the package with the `rm -Rf /` in
its post_install(). This package is totally valid, because it's totally
valid bash without any syntax errors. This package can perfectly
uploaded to AUR, is fully supported by AUR and every AUR helper, and can
flawlessly be installed. Is it a good package, just because it is
valid and has no syntax errors? Just think about that and think about
the meaning of quality, quality assurance (QA) and good packaging.

The AUR helpers - all of them - support everything what AUR supports.
AUR does NOT support split packages. Otherwise such a hackish
workaround wouldn't be needed. So there's no problem with the AUR
helpers. Would this be a problem with an AUR helper I would have filed
a bug report for this.

> Third. The AUR is not meant to help you build source packages. It
> hosts them, and parses the tarballs only for convenience. You are
> supposed to install it by your own means. If your means are buggy,
> that's your problem.

Wrong again. AUR is meant to provide PKGBUILDs so that other people can
use and install them without rewriting them by themselves. They don't
parse them only for my convenience, they parse the PKGBUILDs to assure
that the PKGBUILDs are valid and most likely working.

> Finally, yes, there are problems with Arch source packages but you're
> missing the solution by lightyears. These things have been discussed
> on the list, the forums, and the bugtracker. You would be keen to do a
> little research and perhaps propose solutions (patches?) rather than
> wasting precious oxygen.

I know these discussions, and I know the results of these discussions.
You seem to have forgotten them. And, yes, the result of the discussion
about implementing support for split packages into AUR, which was
requested by a lot of people, btw., was that it does not going to be
supported, because nobody wanted to write the patches. Maybe you have
missed this discussion.

Heiko