[aur-general] TU application: Daurnimator

[Eli Schwartz]

On 12/16/18 11:27 PM, Daurnimator wrote:
> It does have LIBFLAG which I believe should be contain LDFLAGS.
> See https://github.com/luarocks/luarocks/issues/429

I don't know what this means. Does it or doesn't it? Shall I assume that
its being open for several years with no activity at all means tht it
does *not* respect LDFLAGS without overloading them into CFLAGS, and
that there's no intention to ever change this?

>> This is relevant, I believe, given that daurnimator appears to be a
>> member of both the lua and luarocks organizations on github, and
>> presumably has some degree of influence.
> 
> Note that I am only a reviewer/maintainer for both orgs, I do not
> control any decision making processes.
> I can, of course, suggest things, but so can everyone else!

This strips the word of all meaning, but okay, apparently the
organization in question means nothing. Got it.

>> And I do sort of think that pushing things like this to upstream
>> attention is kind of important from a packaging perspective. If I were a
>> lua user rather than an idle bystander who happened to notice something
>> odd being discussed, I would definitely be aggressively advocating for
>> this upstream.
> 
> Lua has a very diverse set of users, including those that
>   - refuse to use anything more modern than C89
>   - are game developers
>   - use windows
>   - are using lua on a microcontroller
>   - refuse to be in the same room as autotools
>   - say that libtool is the only way to package libraries
>   - refuse to be in the same room as libtool
>   - are super performance sensitive
> Trying to solve packaging and ecosystem issues is very difficult in
> such an environment.

Autotools and libtool build systems traditionally don't handle
pkg-config at all, except if autotools is the parent software executing
the "sed" command on a pkg-config file. So I guess, oddly enough,
everyone can agree on this!

I'm finding it very hard to imagine why c89, game developers,
microcontroller users, or people who care about performance would be at
all opposed to distributing an inert text file. I guess Windows users
might feel like it is a waste, but it's still hardly controversial.

Can you clarify what any of this has to do with anything? Why would
anyone feel hurt by this? How does this answer my observation that it's
something to push upstream?

> By being a trusted user I hope that it adds substance behind some
> upstream reform, where the response has sometimes been "we will only
> change this if a majority of distros agree".

I'm sure that, Trusted User or not, you can point to any number of
cross-distro policies to agree to. And you hardly need to be a Trusted
User to write good lua packaging documentation and point to how
wonderful having standard pkg-config files are.

I'm afraid I simply don't see how this has any bearing on anything. If
the lua developers claim that a majority of distros fail to agree that
pkg-config files describing the lua distribution are a good thing, then
they're simply arguing for the sake of arguing, and no proofs will ever
be enough for them.

I really, really hope this application is not *just* about being able to
wave your credentials as a TU at the lua developers. But so far you've
failed to specify what your other tangible goals are. :(

>> It's especially important to answer them given that the candidate's
>> application stated "the primary goal of improving Arch's Lua packages",
>> but so far we have not been told what that means and can only guess
>> based on what others have observed of his PKGBUILDs.
>>
>> Foxboron, you said your candidate reached out to some people people via
>> email to discuss "the current state of our LUA packages where he wanted
>> to help improve the situation". Was this discussed during that private
>> email conversation?
>>
>> Daurnimator, can you elaborate on your plans?
> 
> I don't have a full answer for this yet! It's not as if I intend to go
> in and change everything on the first day I'm a TU.

My takeaway from this is that you have not come into your application
with any answer at all, and intend to begin work only after being
elected. A pity, since PKGBUILD standards are a hobby of mine and I
would have liked to take a look at something which is actually there to
be looked at, at least as a beginning.

I guess the lack of an answer explains why your AUR packages lack the
answer you say you applied as a TU in order to fix in [community].

> Problems need to be proposed, existing solutions need to be
> investigated, and I'll try to come to agreement with other distro
> maintainers, as well as other arch TUs.

I literally don't even parse the paragraph. As far as I can tell we have
lots of proposed problems, and no existing solutions at all. Am I
totally misreading this and there is, in fact, some solution(s) to be
discussing? Is there some hidden meaning in this paragraph I don't quite
grok?

As far as coming to agreement with other distributions, distributions
have never "agreed" on how to package upstream code. It's hardly
agreeing if code in general comes with one method approved by upstream
by which to build it -- it's just obeying upstream. As for agreeing with
Arch TUs, I thought this whole application process was supposed to be
about you having ideas due to the lack of significant knowledge or care
by any existing TUs.

I just really want to understand what this all means here.

- You applied saying you are a knowledgeable lua person and wish to make
  the quality of lua within our official repositories, better.

- Now you're telling us you don't actually have any ideas but you hope
  that we do and you can agree with our ideas? Or that you have no ideas
  right now but if elected as a TU you will commit to having some?

...

When I first opened this application I was like "hey, cool, person wants
to make lua PKGBUILDs better. Sounds fascinating, I wonder what his
ideas are". Well, by the time I finally responded no ideas were
forthcoming, but instead I'm getting lots of evasion and "If anyone
would like to help out with this I'm all ears" and "Problems need to be
proposed, existing solutions need to be investigated".

I'm a simple person, which is in part why I like Arch, because there's
supposed to be this culture of just, like, getting things done.
Something is wrong? Fix it. Come up with ideas and assert them, win
people over by the practicality and usefulness of your suggestions.
Especially when no one else has any opinions, so if you don't
proactively fix it yourself it will never be fixed.

Go-getters are awesome.

This ceremonial desire to quintuple-check with I'm not even sure who
anymore, while remaining utterly vague on your professed *primary goal*,
is just making me confused and uninterested in this whole thread. I no
longer believe in your OP.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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