[aur-general] AUR GIT and Bug Tracker

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Sun, 17 Aug 2014 at 17:50:54, Ido Rosen wrote:
> [...]
> Seeing the discussion about using info/alternates to store git objects
> for all repos in one place, it sounds a lot like they're reinventing
> the wheel...  Git integration would be fantastic, but I'd strongly
> suggest that AUR devs not reinvent the wheel - let GitHub or BitBucket
> or Gitorious, etc. do the Git hosting for you, and do actions based on
> web-hooks[1], which most git hosts support.
> 

It is not only about parsing package data. We need a centralized place
where people can submit and discuss packages. That centralized place
must allow for easily changing the maintainer (disown/adopt) and we (the
Trusted Users) need full control (permissions to delete, merge, remove
comments, ...) of every repository.

A first idea was to using existing services for hosting but then there
are only two options:

* Statically connect each AUR package to a repository that is hosted
  somewhere else. Means we do not have full control over the
  repositories since we do not host them and we cannot simply switch to
  another repository if the maintainer becomes inactive/irresponsible.

* Dynamically connect each AUR package to a repository, so that it is
  easy to switch to a new repository if someone maintains a fork of the
  same package somewhere. Means we are going to lose all comments, bug
  tickets, ...

So we cannot use any features the Git hosting services provide, apart
from hosting the repositories themselves which is trivial (apart from
authentication stuff that has already been implemented, though). As a
byproduct of setting up our own SSH/Git infrastructure, you will also be
able to perform several basic AUR operations (create a new package,
adopt a package, ...) via the command line which is a nice feature on
its own.

You can still collaborate using a decentralized work flow, put your
stuff on GitHub, let people issue pull requests etc. but the main
repositories will be hosted on aur.archlinux.org.

> [1] https://developer.github.com/webhooks/
> 
> PS: I already maintain all of my PKGBUILDs in one git repository on
> GitHub (https://github.com/ido/packages-archlinux).  If the git
> integration supports GitHub (or even if not), I would then switch to
> adding each of the packages as git submodules to my master project
> (which would include a vagrantfile and my build environment)...making
> my package build environment reproducible for any other packagers/AUR
> users.
> 
>