What happened to the comments?

SanskritFritz · 2010-03-29 11:27:04

SanskritFritz wrote:

But why care so much about the encoding? Most comments are in plain english, and if I see a hungarian message with garbled characters, I still can figure out what it is about. Losing the comments makes AUR much less usable, I rely on the comments when I try to decide, whether I want to upgrade a package or not. And this is more important than having it all properly encoded. You can fix the encoding while the comments are still shown. Why delete them?

Let me please repeat that. I personally dont care about encodings. Most of the comments should be perfectly readable, as they are in english. English characters encoded in UTF8 do not differ at all from their ANSI original. So, why shut down a whole system when it is more than pratially readable and still VERY useful? I mean, come on, the trustwordiness of packages are almost lost for us noobs by not being able to see the comments of experts. What do you think about this idea of still having the comments intact while trying to convert them to UTF8? What is the reason you cannot do this?

Allan · 2010-03-29 11:37:18

Yes we heard you the first time and the issue did not magically fix itself... Continual bitching will not help.

SanskritFritz · 2010-03-29 11:57:42

I wouldnt have bitched if you explained the situation. A simple, 'this can't be done due to technical reasons' or 'we dont agree, wait for the update' whould have helped here. I hope I'm not offending anyone, dont get me wrong.

Allan · 2010-03-29 12:07:17

I provided a link to the mailing list thread where all the information about progress is being discussed.

SanskritFritz · 2010-03-29 13:48:29

Allan wrote:

I provided a link to the mailing list thread where all the information about progress is being discussed.

uhh... thanks
*embarrassed*

cactus · 2010-03-30 22:41:16

Who cares about old comments anyway?

Someone should just slap a disqus javascript block in there and be done with it! Farm out the comment system!

ConnorBehan · 2010-03-31 02:31:15

I'm also annoyed at this (hopefully temporary) lack of comments... but I am more annoyed by this:

toxygen wrote:

maybe it's my new smoking habit

Why would you suddenly start smoking? Quit already, you dumbass.

keenerd · 2010-03-31 03:01:59

If anyone really wants comments, I have a slightly out of date copy of the AUR. It's a pickle file, but it could put into other forms.

Gen2ly · 2010-03-31 05:34:08

Read the link that Allan provided.

litemotiv · 2010-03-31 09:02:16

cactus wrote:

Who cares about old comments anyway?
Someone should just slap a disqus javascript block in there and be done with it! Farm out the comment system!

+1 for sensibility

edit: or is that 'sensibleness' in english?

Last edited by litemotiv (2010-03-31 11:02:20)

ninian · 2010-03-31 10:11:20

On many occasions the comments attached to packages in the AUR have been invaluable to me, clarifying installation points, suggesting improvements to the PKGBUILDs, and alerting us to bugs. Disengaging such comments from the AUR and relegating them to a forum would be a backwards step in my opinion. Inevitably it would be harder to dig out the juicy information as above, amidst the usual forum noise.

SanskritFritz · 2010-03-31 10:26:38

Agreed

toxygen · 2010-03-31 15:54:23

ConnorBehan wrote:

I'm also annoyed at this (hopefully temporary) lack of comments... but I am more annoyed by this:
toxygen wrote:
maybe it's my new smoking habit
Why would you suddenly start smoking? Quit already, you dumbass.

OT but I had to respond - wasnt talking 'bout cigarettes

and it was not a sudden start, it was a "new" habit after several months without (spring is here, had a nice bonus, etc)

end OT (and if that also makes me a dumbass, then i'm a dumbass!)

Last edited by toxygen (2010-03-31 15:55:58)

Gen2ly · 2010-04-04 09:30:56

** Gen2ly begins to shiver **

cactus · 2010-04-05 07:29:54

** begins to shiver gently **

rcoyner · 2010-04-05 18:00:33

Daenyth wrote:

Louipc had to remove all comments due to encoding issues when updating the database -- see aur-general for more details.

I'm all for switching to UTF8, but the comments should have been properly converted. If nobody had the time to properly convert it, the upgrade should not have happened. I don't know what the schema exactly looks like, but this shouldn't be difficult to do. Does anybody have a mysqldump of the old comments preserved?

Last edited by rcoyner (2010-04-05 18:00:59)

Gen2ly · 2010-04-06 04:17:28

Well it looks like someone has stepped in and been able to convert to UTF8 with only a few odd character traces in places. I'll put up the link again where the discussion is taking place:

http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/ … 08532.html

Unfortunately no one has responded to the repairs for the last week.

Nareto · 2010-04-21 09:29:35

So we should definitely loose hope of having comments back?

Nareto · 2010-04-27 13:36:55

I know that ranting won't solve this, but, hey, I'm staggered to see that nothing's being done for this.

In the mailing list thread that was posted, Firmicus in the end said:

I did it last Thursday. I've done my best to repair the mysql backup
Loui pointed me at. I'd say it's 95% fixed now, but the procedure left a
few isolated illegal characters in its trail (like this: ), especially
within Cyrillic and CJK. The text should be legible however

isn't 95% good enough? Far better than nothing...

Is the needed operation of merging these old comments (that have been allmost totally converted) with the new comments that have appeared on the AUR difficult/next to impossible?

In this thread so many good reasons have been pointed out regarding the usefulness of the comments.

dcc24 · 2010-04-27 13:59:26

Can we at least get a response from whoever made this in the first place?

ConnorBehan · 2010-04-27 21:07:49

Yes... are the illegal characters just parts of words or entire words? I will gladly go through the text and change:

We ned to ptch this for gcc .5 and kernel 2.633

to:

We need to patch this for gcc 4.5 and kernel 2.6.33

Please give me an ssh account so I can do this.

fsckd · 2010-04-28 22:05:57

Would it not be feasible to put the old comments on a separate page and have a link to them at the bottom the original aur page of associated packages?

Gen2ly · 2010-04-29 03:06:58

At this point, I've pretty much relegated to just be allowed to post PKGBUILDs. . That big heavy letter is very intimidating.

cpslanet · 2010-04-29 12:38:20

Don't really understand what's so hard about it.. http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/TIP_Conv … 8_in_MySQL

Bring those comments back, in many cases there was valuable information among them. Shame on you to "loose" them in the first place, this is a linux distribution we are talking about and not just some web site you fiddle with in your basement. If comments can disappear this easy I'm very afraid about what can happen to other areas..

dcc24 · 2010-04-29 22:33:56

I have to agree with cpslanet here. There is simply no excuse for losing the comments. If, when messing with the code, there is even a slight chance of screwing things up, you first take a backup and when you do mess up, you restore it. You DO NOT say "we'll deal with those in the future". In this case, the stuff that got fixed (which wasn't broken) broke the comments. That's not a fix, that's a screw up/bug. The fact that whoever is responsible for this mess doesn't reply here, really doesn't help much.

Arch Linux

#26 2010-03-29 11:27:04

Re: What happened to the comments?

#27 2010-03-29 11:37:18

Re: What happened to the comments?

#28 2010-03-29 11:57:42

Re: What happened to the comments?

#29 2010-03-29 12:07:17

Re: What happened to the comments?

#30 2010-03-29 13:48:29

Re: What happened to the comments?

#31 2010-03-30 22:41:16

Re: What happened to the comments?

#32 2010-03-31 02:31:15

Re: What happened to the comments?

#33 2010-03-31 03:01:59

Re: What happened to the comments?

#34 2010-03-31 05:34:08

Re: What happened to the comments?

#35 2010-03-31 09:02:16

Re: What happened to the comments?

#36 2010-03-31 10:11:20

Re: What happened to the comments?

#37 2010-03-31 10:26:38

Re: What happened to the comments?

#38 2010-03-31 15:54:23

Re: What happened to the comments?

#39 2010-04-04 09:30:56

Re: What happened to the comments?

#40 2010-04-05 07:29:54

Re: What happened to the comments?

#41 2010-04-05 18:00:33

Re: What happened to the comments?

#42 2010-04-06 04:17:28

Re: What happened to the comments?

#43 2010-04-21 09:29:35

Re: What happened to the comments?

#44 2010-04-27 13:36:55

Re: What happened to the comments?

#45 2010-04-27 13:59:26

Re: What happened to the comments?

#46 2010-04-27 21:07:49

Re: What happened to the comments?

#47 2010-04-28 22:05:57

Re: What happened to the comments?

#48 2010-04-29 03:06:58

Re: What happened to the comments?

#49 2010-04-29 12:38:20

Re: What happened to the comments?

#50 2010-04-29 22:33:56

Re: What happened to the comments?

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