[aur-general] aur client

[Eli Schwartz]

On 10/28/19 9:49 PM, Alberto Salvia Novella wrote:

What is with your email headers, and the waves of duplicated email I
just got.

To: Arch Linux - Announcements <arch-announce at archlinux.org>,
 Arch Linux - General <arch-general at archlinux.org>,
 Arch Linux - Projects <arch-projects at archlinux.org>,
 Arch Linux - AUR Development <aur-dev at archlinux.org>,
 Arch Linux - AUR General <aur-general at archlinux.org>

Do you have a good reason for unsuccessfully trying to get past the
password filter on the arch-announce mailing list, which is only
permitted to be posted to by the www.archlinux.org server software
sending out notifications for the front-page news?

Do you have a good reason for trying to announce your AUR helper on the
arch-projects mailing list, which is self-described as:

"Development discussion, patches and pull requests for the Arch Linux
projects: dbscripts, devtools, mkinitcpio, namcap, netctl, archweb,
pyalpm. Please begin the email subject with the name of a project in
square brackets (e.g. [devtools]). If no project matches, use [projects]."

(Your email was, however, rejected from that list because the subject
header did not contain a tag for one of the official
https://git.archlinux.org projects.)

> Since publishing to the AUR is something that all packagers do quite
> frequently, I have developed a software that reduces the related
> operations to the bare minimum, making publishing to the AUR instant.
> 
> Basically it's a SMED <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aoqra9bXAAg>
> system. 

"Since packagers quite frequently package things, we need a way to help
people package things as utterly fast as possible, without wasting any
time at all."

This "SMED" thing seems to suggest that the most important thing for the
consumer industry is fast labor to produce (cookie-cutter?) products
more efficiently. Fine...

Why is this relevant to the AUR, which is a creative labor in which
uploads require a social contract of responsibility, that responsibility
being "I believe I have to the best of my abilities tried to avoid
uploading actual literal 💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩" as well as "the package
actually successfully builds on my machine"?

(Ideally the package successfully builds and runs in a makechrootpkg
clean-build container.)

Automation of boring trivia is not necessarily a bad thing, but it comes
across as rather funny (funny as in "weird, not funny as in "haha") when
your rationale brings positive reinforcement from a promotional video
about quantity over quality.

> The software is called "aur
> <https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/aur-git>" itself, and you can check
> its manual out by in the terminal entering:

You're really shooting for the most impressive namespace here, I see. :)

I have looked at your AUR package, and it seems to also use another AUR
package you uploaded -- "silently-git", whose purpose is to run commands
and delete their stdout/stderr unless the command returns a fatal exit
code, in which case it only deletes stdout.

(Note it also uses badly escaped messages and eval, resulting in
incorrect commit messages for things that contain, say, quotes.)

This is utterly wrong, since makepkg can emit information on stderr at
loglevel "warning" (bold yellow "==> WARNING:" followed by some warning)
while also exiting with a successful return code, and users should make
sure that the warning does not denote something bad (sometimes it does).
More generally, I have certainly seen packages whose build systems
returned successfully -- and packaged nothing, or just packaged an
incomplete portion of the software -- due to incorrectly masking return
values of commands in their Makefile.

Especially if this is geared to people maintaining/uploading packages, I
have a hard time seeing this as anything other than a very bad goal to
begin with.

> curl --silent https://gitlab.com/es20490446e/aur/raw/master/assets/aur.1
>> aur.1; man ./aur.1; rm aur.1
> 
> As long as constructive, suggestions are very welcome. When replying
> please include my email address in the recipients list.

No, this is not how mailing lists work. You are posting here to start a
discussion, it's expected you subscribe to the discussion rather than
ask people to manually add your email address to Cc: (and then re-add it
every time it gets dropped by another poster). You are automatically
going to miss at least some responses (you have missed 100% of the
single response before mine). Please re-enable mail delivery for this
mailing list if you expect to have a discussion on it.

This is also not how feedback works. You don't get to say no one is
allowed to talk to you unless they agree with you, so let's not have
another of your mailing list threads where you claim everyone who
disagrees with you is being "not constructive" and therefore their
comments are "not welcome".

No one here is interested in a repetition of

https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2019-October/046991.html
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2019-October/046999.html

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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