[aur-general] audacity3

alad alad at archlinux.org
Tue Jun 22 10:16:27 UTC 2021


On 22/06/2021 12:05, Sam Mulvey via aur-general wrote:
>
> On 6/22/21 1:48 AM, Caleb Maclennan via aur-general wrote:
>> As background, many years ago when working as an audio engineer I 
>> used to
>> use it in production nearly full time. I'm quite familiar with it's past
>> and the weird development practices upstream (such as forked toolkit
>> versions). I am no longer in that field and only occasionally dabble 
>> with
>> it for hobby purposes. 
>
> I grant that I'm not a part of the TU discussion, have little interest 
> in the TU process, and only manage one significant package, but 
> audacity is relevant to my interests as I am a community broadcast 
> engineer and use arch pretty much everywhere in that context.   I'm in 
> audacity every day.  It is as important to my work flow as my text 
> editor is.
>
> I fully support the efforts to tame audacity3 to the point that I took 
> some shots at it privately.  Keeping it out of the repos is a good 
> idea.  But most of my show producers and all of my clients use other 
> operating systems and are already on audacity3, and I am in no 
> position to dictate what version they can run.  I already get aup3 
> files from clients now.  After seeing packages repeatedly disappear, I 
> created a package that compiled it as upstream demands, dumped it all 
> in /opt, named it "audacity-bs" for obvious reasons, and called it a 
> day.   It is not a thing I would even think of putting on AUR.
>
> But now my confusion at the disappearing packages is now replaced with 
> confusion that using collaborative tools to solve a non-trivial 
> problem is prohibited in this case where it is not in others, just as 
> Caleb said.  This feels like a political issue eclipsing a real 
> technical issue for real users.  If this is not an exception, there 
> should be no exceptions and it should be made more clear.
>
> I'm not interested in having it out on the forum or the AUR comments, 
> I'm not much for that sort of thing.  So I'm late to this party.   But 
> it is important enough to me to amplify my bafflement.

There's 59 TUs looking after 70676 packages and moderating 85141 users. 
To make that manageable, you need some a strict set of rules. One of 
them is not submitting "-latest" packages that are already in the repos.

It works pretty well in the general case. For audacity3, it ostensibly 
doesn't. But rather than make the rules (and with that, moderation) 
complicated for all packages - merely for a single package - that single 
package should be sorted out instead. For example, by dropping it to AUR 
where points like interoperability with other packages and vendoring of 
dependencies don't really matter.

Alad

>
> -Sam


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