[aur-general] How should I handle VCS packages right?

[Jan Alexander Steffens]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 11:35 PM, Christopher Reimer <mail at creimer.net> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I'm maintainer of a project called VDR4Arch.
> https://github.com/VDR4Arch/vdr4arch
>
> I recently started taking over a bunch of packages in AUR. My main goal is
> to follow the best practices from the Developer Wiki as good as possible.
>
> A lot of plugins for vdr are more or less orphaned upstream. There are no
> regular releases and the last one is usually a year back. However there are
> still commit in the GIt repository. And around the vdr community it's common
> practice to use these Git revisions and consider them stable. The community
> even keeps these plugins alive with compatibility patches.
>
> Usually I would say that these are VCS packages and need to be suffixed by
> -git. But to distribute the version everyone in the community expects I
> started using the VCS feature with fixed commit ids, which are tested by me
> or somebody trusted. I create these packages without the -git suffix.
>
> I'd like to know how a Trusted User or even an Arch Developer would handle
> this. Is this approach acceptable?

-git packages are expected to track the latest development (usually
the master branch), generating a dynamically versioned package from
the head commit. If you lock your releases to certain commits or tags,
it's not fundamentally different from a package using tarballs.

If you grep ABS for '#\(tag\|commit\|revision\)=' you'll find a lot of
packages grabbing sources from bzr, git or svn.