[aur-general] AUR4, git, subtrees ELI5?

[Ido Rosen]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 10:03 PM, Eli Schwartz <eschwartz93 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 8:44 PM, David Kaylor <dpkaylor at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I have so few packages to maintain, the burden to me is very low. And I'm
>> just taking it as oppurtunity to finally learn to use Git. But a tool for
>> submitting a tarball and having AUR4 do the conversion is a good one. Might
>> help prrevent a massive pile of orphans after July 8th. Maintainers are
>> going to have to jump through the hoops, though, one way or the other.
>>
>
> Well, sure, git is fun. :)
>
> But tarball uploads means maintainers wouldn't have to go through any more
> hoops than they do already. Primarily, I am wondering what people who
> refuse to learn git *just* to contribute to the AUR might think. Any local
> abstraction tool would have to be fairly robust to deal with e.g.
> authentication, first-time updating a package that already exists, and in
> combination with transferring to another computer.
>
> vs. providing a compatibility layer over the old tarball interface, since
> aurweb already has everything else.
>
> -- Eli Schwartz

I was surprised that the AUR devs didn't include an easy "press a
button on the website" or "ssh aur4 setup-repos-seed-with-aur-mirror"
way to import a package from the
http://pkgbuild.com/git/aur-mirror.git/ git repository...  It's
unofficial, but it has the daily history.

Perhaps an easy solution is to offer such a service on the AUR4
website from a local clone of that aur-mirror git repository to seed
the repository, and then also offer a tarball upload ssh command (e.g.
"cat example.1.src.tar.gz | ssh aur4 process-tarball", where
process-tarball is just a script that untars, commits, and pushes the
contents on the server side as-if it was the user)?