Dusty
]]>I think many of the suggestions here made have been recently implemented in 1.1, especially all the email notification but also some of the improved UI.
Also, know that we are now resolved to make [community] and the unsupported collection accessible via cvsup, so that you can fetch the whole thing cleanly at once. Hopefully that will be a better solution than aurscrape -- which is effective.. don't mean to disparage it.. but inefficient.
Integration with ABS wholesale is a different topic. We won't support/suggest that anyone actually use ABS or srcpac to build packages in the unsuppported collection; this is just a patently bad idea. It's possible that nobody has reviewed those PKGBUILDs, and it's possible the devil himself has submitted them.
However, there is no particularly good reason not to allow [community] to be integrated with ABS, and so we will suggest to Judd that he make [community] an inactive entry in abs.conf that people can turn on if they like.
I find myself strangely attracted to the idea of a CLI for searching unsupported, like what "pacman -Ss" does across repos. This won't be easy but maybe in a later release.
Finally, I thank you all for your good observations, suggestions, and ideas. This whole thing really is about the power of the community.
To that end, I wish to mention my opinion on the biggest thing the AUR is lacking: MORE TUs. Right now the ratio of packages in unsupported to packages in [community] is about 6:1. My own personal goal is to get that down to 2:1 in the next 6 months.
We realize that right now the concept of a TU is not well defined, and the process for becoming one is intimidating. So I'd like to start a discussion on how we could improve the process and get more people who would make good TUs on board. The two things you most need to do to be a TU are: 1) be someone we can trust and 2) be someone who understands the packaging guidelines inside out and is meticulous. Why are these requirements? Because you'll be deciding on behalf of the community what binary packages go into [community] and then go on to people's Arch boxes and get run.
The AUR is just now really beginning to gather steam. Be patient with the package "graduation" process. I plan to do what I can to help it by picking some popular packages (and/or ones I know I use and will maintain) and graduating them to [extra]. However, it's been busy for me lately, and it hasn't happened yet. Fear not, it will.
So in closing, I give you a tangible thing *you* can do: Think about becoming a TU. Once you've thought about it, send me an email (paul at archlinux dot org) and tell me you're interested. I will act as a clearinghouse, sending the list of interested parties out to the TUs at large. I will try to strike up an email conversation with you to get to know you better.
Thanks,
Paul
I mus be missing out on something. What's AUR?
/me goes to check wiki
aur.archlinux.org
]]>I'd go ahead and edit the PKBUILD for my own purposes, but how do I let the maintainer know whats up? I imagine I could send an email, but it'd be nice to have a built in communication system within AUR. I've tried just leaving comments, but they seem to serve no purpose. Is there some sort of interface for maintainers to check on the status of their packages without searching through AUR? Do maintainers have some sort of "My Packages" view?
This is a very good point that you have raised.
Right now I have 5 packages in the AUR, and if someone leaves a comment, I'm not going to know about it till I check it (I haven't checked in a week now). We do have a My packages view, though (which is VERY helpful).
What would be nice is a thing like in the forums; if someone posts a reply you get an email about it. This would be even more helpful if it is like in flyspray (the bug-reporting system), where the body of the message is mailed too.
Ravster.
P.S.-Checking the aur now, I see that there were two posts yesterday. If not for this thread reminding me, I would probably not have seen the posts till the program developers released a new version of the program.
All in all, I'm comfortable with the direction that Arch packaging is going. I don't know of any distros that have such an interesting means of integrating new packages from the community into the distribution. I really like the community approach that we seem to be taking.
]]>Futhermore, if you want to vote for a package, you have to step back into the list view of packages. Because I always decide wether I give a package a try or not after heaving read the PKGBUILD and FILELIST, I have to step backwards in the AUR to vote. As I think everyone who cares for security will check those files before fetching foreign packages, a vote box would be nice deeper in the packages description sites, or in a main frame of the AUR.
Otherwise, the AUR is a step towards my needs.
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