[aur-general] Advice needed maintaining boost-compute

[Eli Schwartz]

On 11/11/2016 12:14 PM, Julien JPK wrote:
> To be honest I was just picking packages I was interested in, with the
> idea of maintaining them on a longer term should it become necessary. I
> understand that the packages I've chosen so far are not tremendously
> active, I just thought these simple update tasks would be a good place
> to start after the wiki. I guess that was yet another mistake...

It's no particularly a mistake. Just keep in mind that *-git packages
don't *need* to be updated. If the maintainer has time on their hands
they are free to push a new version with the latest from-git $pkgver --
and I do that myself.

Some people though, flag those packages as out of date, or even file
orphan requests when the maintainer ignores them (because it *isn't* out
of date). We had a nudnik like that recently, and it was NOT okay! (He
got banned by a TU, happily.)

...

Adopting an orphaned *-git package and updating the $pkgver is fine (as
long as you don't spam people with updates for every commit and stick to
updating on every upstream release, but I doubt you intend to do that,
so it is all good).

Updating non-git packages is very helpful. :)

> I'm not quite sure where you're going with this. While I'm not actually
> a yaourt user, I thought it would be a good way to "confirm" that the
> update had gone through and the updated package was indeed available.
> Now I'm guessing my 3rd mistake is hidden somewhere in there.
> 
> Thank you for your answers, and sorry for the disturbance. Turns out I
> just hadn't been thorough enough in my work.
> 

yaourt can only tell you if you successfully pushed the update to the
AUR website. So it didn't confirm anything other than that you don't
know where the boundaries between AUR helpers, makepkg, and pacman lie.

..

It scares me when people think that yaourt is somehow doing something
that pacman wouldn't do on its own.
yaourt wraps pacman with an interface to the AUR, just like any AUR
helper. Other than the default or configured build directory (which sets
the working directory of `curl $aur_package_downloadurl` and `makepkg`),
using yaourt or any other AUR helper is exactly the same as manually
downloading the PKGBUILD, running `makepkg` and `pacman -U`.

AUR helpers are all about automating the tedious job of downloading and
checking PKGBUILD dependencies by hand.

That. Is. ALL!

The suggestion that makepkg "doesn't run these checks, and the boost
files are simply overwritten (the PKGBUILD runs a simple cp)" is
downright terrifying, and carries the implication that you have
absolutely no idea what it is that makepkg or pacman actually does, and
certainly have no clue how to responsibly use an AUR helper.

I strongly encourage you to learn how the package management and
dependency/conflict resolution system works, it is extremely valuable
information for any AUR user (whether they maintain packages or just
download them).

-- 
Eli Schwartz