[aur-general] New package: disklow

[Tinu Weber]

On Tue, Sep 03, 2019 at 10:52:36 +1200, Holger Jahn wrote:
> > The AUR does not provide source code hosting, on the grounds that other
> > places like Github, Gitlab, git.sr.ht, amd so on are doing it better.
> > Moreover, source code hosting is a resource burden on the provider,
> > which in our case we do not have either a business or community
> > rationale for accepting. (Again: we provide hosting for build recipes
> > because build recipes are something specific to Arch).
> 
> Makes sense, and I would not have done it "my way" if it weren't for the
> fact that my source code is a single Perl file with a mere 1400+ lines of
> code.
> 
> Speaking of "borderline cases", such as mine:

IMNSHO 1400+ lines of Perl (or any) code don't fall into the category of
"borderline cases" at all.

> One of the opt-depend packages my disklow is using, "msmtp-mta", is
> containing a single symlink (/usr/bin/sendmail => msmtp). Perhaps, I should
> have a look at its PKGBUILD (it's most likely simply calling "ln -s" in its
> install() section).

package(), but yes:
https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/msmtp#n51

But what would the symbolic link be needed for?

> > More generally, why would you upload your project in a way that is
> > targeted exclusively for Arch users? What if users of a different distro
> > wanted to use your software?
> 
> Because I am going to provide the packages for them myself.

I don't think one can realistically package something for all the
different distributions out there; you will inevitably end up excluding
quite a number of platforms.

I think this should have already been obvious enough while writing that
sendmail-setup.txt, where it only explains the setup steps for Arch and
CentOS, and for the others there is just:

[/usr/share/doc/disklow/sendmail-setup.txt]
> Please understand that there are so many different mail system setups
> in existence today, that it is impossible to cater for more than a few
> basic mail system configurations here.

Ó_ô

And by not providing a distro-agnostic source for obtaining the code,
this also discourages other people from stepping up and packaging it
themselves; it's unnecessarily cumbersome and I kind of see it as a
middle finger towards distribution packagers.

And because https://{that_url_there}/repos is not browsable, people
can't even know for what distributions the software has already been
packaged; that's a middle finger also to the distribution *users*.

And even for Arch users, reviewing the code becomes difficult, because
(as already mentioned):

On Mon, Sep 02, 2019 at 10:46:48 -0400, Eli Schwartz via aur-general wrote:
> > […] regardless of where you host it, why would you upload it as a
> > tarball checked into git?

Essentially, we lose all the nice VCS features, most notably the ability
to conveniently track changes: we now have to obtain the tarballs for
the old and the new version, extract them, and diff them manually.

--Tinu
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/attachments/20190903/699e426d/attachment-0001.sig>