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

[David Kaylor]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 8:22 AM, Lukas Fleischer <lfleischer at archlinux.org>
wrote:

>
> "Culling the herd" (using your words, even though I dislike that
> metaphor) is something that always happens when you introduce a new
> system. Users need time to get used to it, some of them back out. Just
> to clarify: We don't want to make the AUR a place for elitists and we
> are trying to make it as convenient as possible for users to continue
> contributing. On the other hand, though, we also want to use the chance
> of having to reimport all packages to improve the overall quality of the
> AUR (less broken and unmaintained packages, less clutter). We also need
> to keep an eye on maintainability: I am the only regular aurweb
> contributor these days.
>
> Regarding your request to state intentions from the very beginning, the
> first sentence in the AUR 4 section of the Arch wiki is:
>
>     Since release 4.0.0, aurweb uses Git repositories for AUR packages
>     which means that the package submission process is a bit different.
>
> In my opinion, that makes it pretty obvious that maintainers need to
> know or learn Git. If you disagree, feel free to improve that section,
> it is a wiki!
>
> Regards,
> Lukas
>

I just tweaked the language in the wiki a bit.

My point is that if one of the objectives is to force more discipline among
maintainers going forward, then there is no reason to hide that fact. I
suspect it would be more accurate to say you see it as a "fortunate side
affect" of modernizing and increasing the maintainable of the AUR, which I
think you have achieved with AUR4. And I agree with you on that.

As an aside, the english language phrases "culling the herd", "thinning the
herd", etc. need not have any negative connotations. Harsh as it may be,
modern humans wouldn't exist otherwise. Nor would Arch, and numerous other
distros. Or the Linux kernel in general, for that matter.