Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

jasonwryan · 2014-01-05 19:03:31

Submitting a package is no big deal. If the AUR was wiped every year, with a two week warning for people to orpan/adopt the packages they need, we'd have a User Repository that befits a rolling release of technically competent users.

karol · 2014-01-05 19:15:21

jasonwryan wrote:

Submitting a package is no big deal. If the AUR was wiped every year, with a two week warning for people to orpan/adopt the packages they need, we'd have a User Repository that befits a rolling release of technically competent users.

+1 from me. Instead of an AUR cleanup once or twice a year, we wold have an annual Purge :-)

I try to keep up with new (new, not just updated) packages that are submitted to AUR via an rss feed. Once in a while I find something interesting, something worth recommending.
If e.g. on Dec 31st the AUR is wiped clean (but the old PKGBUILDs are still on the git mirror) and on Jan 1st hundreds of packages are submitted, I'd like to have a way of filtering out the resubmitted packages, in case they're marked as 'new', instead of 'updated'.

HalosGhost · 2014-01-05 19:28:24

I guess what I would love to see for the ALUR is maintenance through git. So, rather than having the whole thing backed up through git, let's just run the thing through git. That way, multiple people could officially maintain a single package, pull requests to update a package would be so much simpler, branching for different builds of essentially the same package would be incredibly simple (e.g., firefox-aurora, firefox-nightly, firefox-ux, etc.).

There are some obvious problems with this notion: for example, each pkgbuild having its own git repo seems crazy from an overhead standpoint (to me). But I feel like this may be the best way of having the ALUR open to community contribution along with supporting all the incredibly nice features that git offers.

All the best,

-HG

Inxsible · 2014-01-05 20:46:33

jasonwryan wrote:

Submitting a package is no big deal. If the AUR was wiped every year, with a two week warning for people to orpan/adopt the packages they need, we'd have a User Repository that befits a rolling release of technically competent users.

+1 from me too. This would also make people maintain apps that they use everyday (mostly) which is added incentive to keep the packages updated. Many times a package is owned by someone but they dont use it anymore. I know I am guilty of it for a couple of packages as well.

anonymous_user · 2014-01-05 20:53:49

jasonwryan wrote:

Submitting a package is no big deal. If the AUR was wiped every year, with a two week warning for people to orpan/adopt the packages they need, we'd have a User Repository that befits a rolling release of technically competent users.

+1 from me. What better way to start the New Year, than with a fresh, new AUR

SanskritFritz · 2014-01-06 09:49:45

I personally don't mind a wipe provided the old contents would be available somewhere for reference. I think the comments are very useful, imagine I find a software I decide to use and search in the AUR where I find a two years old orphaned package with useful comments and adopt it, and this way I don't have to start from scratch. This actually happened to me with several dockapps for example.

Last edited by SanskritFritz (2014-01-06 13:07:03)

nomorewindows · 2014-01-06 16:05:38

The submittals that have been there since who knows how long would be the prime suspects for being no longer maintained.

Thorsten Reinbold · 2014-01-06 16:16:46

jasonwryan wrote:

Submitting a package is no big deal. If the AUR was wiped every year, with a two week warning for people to orpan/adopt the packages they need, we'd have a User Repository that befits a rolling release of technically competent users.

Wise words. +1

graysky · 2014-01-06 16:31:27

nomorewindows wrote:

The submittals that have been there since who knows how long would be the prime suspects for being no longer maintained.

True, but some PKGBUILDs are non-trivial and a user searching and then finding a broken one would have the benefit of a history of what is there and doesn't work. It could be that a minor tweak is needed to fix it. This has been the case for me with a number of PKGBUILDs in the AUR. I guess I'm indirectly "+1'ing" the suggestion for some version controlled AUR...

Last edited by graysky (2014-01-06 16:31:57)

SanskritFritz · 2014-01-06 17:51:09

graysky wrote:

some PKGBUILDs are non-trivial and a user searching and then finding a broken one would have the benefit of a history of what is there and doesn't work. It could be that a minor tweak is needed to fix it. This has been the case for me with a number of PKGBUILDs in the AUR.

Exactly. We should probably take the route which is the least work for the AUR devs and leave all the work to us AUR package maintainers. IMHO that route is making a copy of the current state, put it up read-only and wipe the AUR. Versioning is already done anyway.

Awebb · 2014-01-06 19:02:10

So every year, the AUR goes read only archive style and a clean AUR is born. Why not...

WonderWoofy · 2014-01-06 19:14:56

SanskritFritz wrote:

IMHO that route is making a copy of the current state, put it up read-only and wipe the AUR. Versioning is already done anyway.

I like this idea. Indeed the srcpackages are versioned already, so the preservation of the comments in some form would seem to address any concern I may have had. Though I didn't think that the idea of simply wiping the AUR was a terrible idea to begin with.

rodyaj · 2014-01-06 19:20:48

I'd like to see an upvote/downvote system as it would give a better indication of which packages have slacked off in quality.

Last edited by rodyaj (2014-01-06 19:22:21)

anonymous_user · 2014-01-06 19:22:11

AUR already has a voting system. A package cannot receive negative votes though.

Last edited by anonymous_user (2014-01-06 19:22:38)

rodyaj · 2014-01-06 19:23:14

anonymous_user wrote:

AUR already has a voting system. You cannot vote down a package though.

Yes I know, but having a downvote ability would give extra information.

anonymous_user · 2014-01-06 19:26:24

What extra information do you mean? If a package is broken or the PKGBUILD could otherwise be improved, the maintainer should be notified. Adding a "broken" flag to the AUR would be useful for this though it doesn't help if the maintainer is MIA, their email address bounces, they stopped using Arch Linux, etc.

Last edited by anonymous_user (2014-01-06 19:27:07)

jasonwryan · 2014-01-06 19:28:40

rodyaj wrote:

anonymous_user wrote:
AUR already has a voting system. You cannot vote down a package though.
Yes I know, but having a downvote ability would give extra information.

You can remove your vote for a package.

rodyaj · 2014-01-06 19:38:24

jasonwryan wrote:

rodyaj wrote:
anonymous_user wrote:
AUR already has a voting system. You cannot vote down a package though.
Yes I know, but having a downvote ability would give extra information.
You can remove your vote for a package.

Yes but many of the users who voted may have voted years ago, and possibly even moved on to using others distros or software, so they wouldn't take the time to remove their vote. With a downvote system I could see more recent opinion.

anonymous_user wrote:

What extra information do you mean? If a package is broken or the PKGBUILD could otherwise be improved, the maintainer should be notified. Adding a "broken" flag to the AUR would be useful for this though it doesn't help if the maintainer is MIA, their email address bounces, they stopped using Arch Linux, etc.

Flagging something as out-of-date is one thing, but sometimes a package isn't technically out-of-date; it just isn't that good anymore, or not as good as the competition. I'd rather have a recent indication of the state of a software e.g., if it has a sudden influx of upvotes or downvotes then it would lead me to check out if it had received some sort of drastic overhaul.

Last edited by rodyaj (2014-01-06 20:30:56)

graysky · 2014-01-06 19:39:28

Voting as I understand it is just one check box that an AUR package must hurdle to be adopted into [community]... I don't think it was ever intended for this sort of function.

Another problem with negative votes is that they are time bound... in other words, AUR/foo doesn't build. You vote -1 for it. Others follow suite. A new maintainer fixes it and updates. The negative votes make the fixed version appear broken.

sitquietly · 2014-01-06 19:40:35

Mr.Elendig wrote:

I went on a small rampage a few weeks ago and sent out 30ish emails to maintainers of outdated/broken packages.
Result?
15+ bounced mails
3 replies
2 updated packages (one of them only a version bump, no port to new syntax)
The aur cleanup days we have had havn't really been much more efficient either.

karol wrote:

Currently there is no way to do it, but anyone can post updated / fixed PKGBUILDs in the comments.
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17911

Agree that the AUR contains mostly broken crap. I figured that out when I started developing my own system that
uses pacman and pkgbuilds, building everything from source -- so I write/edit a LOT of pkgbuilds. I can easily fix
many of the problems I encounter in AUR pkgbuilds, often just by referencing the corresponding Gentoo ebuild.
Very seldom I write a comment or write to a maintainer even though I fixed or updated the pkgbuild on my own
system. I could put my entire fixed pkgbuild in a comment but ...

Maybe the better social design would be to open the AUR even more! Make it a wiki! Any registered user can
edit a "page". Changes can be viewed, re-edited, reverted. There would be a small team of "editors" like
Wikipedia has who have authority to revert edits and on occasion ban users who prove to be troublemakers.

I agree that a "broken" button would be misused. Many of our users are technically immature (I'm deliberately polite here)
but I suspect that very few unqualified people will take the bother to register as editors and then actually submit
code. Treating the AUR as a wiki just might make it self-healing...

The problem exists because it's easy for anyone to submit a new package but it is not possible for anyone to fix them.
Maybe it should be just as easy for anyone to edit the pkgbuild as it was to put it there in the first place. (In other words,
we've proved that maintainers do not).

The frosting on the cake would be to come up with a build server that actually builds each package and allows the
edited pkgbuild to be published if and only if the damn thing at least builds!

Make the AUR into a wiki! Even if pkgbuilds had to be copy/pasted out of the wiki text, and yaourt ceased to function (OMG!!)
it would be a more useful resource than it is now.

rodyaj · 2014-01-06 19:45:44

graysky wrote:

Voting as I understand it is just one check box that an AUR package must hurdle to be adopted into [community]... I don't think it was ever intended for this sort of function.
Another problem with negative votes is that they are time bound... in other words, AUR/foo doesn't build. You vote -1 for it. Others follow suite. A new maintainer fixes it and updates. The negative votes make the fixed version appear broken.

This is a good point. You would get many people unfairly impulse downvoting just because of a bad compile. Even so, I'd still personally like all the information so that I could see "popular this week", "popular this month". I'm sure I could discern for myself whether the sudden popularity/hate is justified or not.

HalosGhost · 2014-01-06 19:47:33

But having it be world-editable is kind of problematic. That's why I proposed a git repo as the front-end. Anyone can then submit comments and pull requests, but only the maintainers, TUs and contributors can push commits.

All the best,

-HG

nomorewindows · 2014-01-06 20:09:22

Don't forget that the orphan function shows which packages have already been coughed up.

sitquietly · 2014-01-06 20:24:08

HalosGhost wrote:

But having it be world-editable is kind of problematic....

It works for our Wiki, which is world-editable and is the most-beloved and useful feature of Arch Linux.
Even Gentoo users read our wiki for accurate and complete technical info.

Last edited by sitquietly (2014-01-06 20:25:39)

karol · 2014-01-06 20:29:46

I think Arch wiki is mostly outdated as very few users take time to fix stuff there.

Arch Linux

#51 2014-01-05 19:03:31

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#52 2014-01-05 19:15:21

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#53 2014-01-05 19:28:24

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#54 2014-01-05 20:46:33

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#55 2014-01-05 20:53:49

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#56 2014-01-06 09:49:45

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#57 2014-01-06 16:05:38

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#58 2014-01-06 16:16:46

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#59 2014-01-06 16:31:27

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#60 2014-01-06 17:51:09

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#61 2014-01-06 19:02:10

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#62 2014-01-06 19:14:56

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#63 2014-01-06 19:20:48

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#64 2014-01-06 19:22:11

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#65 2014-01-06 19:23:14

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#66 2014-01-06 19:26:24

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#67 2014-01-06 19:28:40

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#68 2014-01-06 19:38:24

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#69 2014-01-06 19:39:28

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#70 2014-01-06 19:40:35

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#71 2014-01-06 19:45:44

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#72 2014-01-06 19:47:33

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#73 2014-01-06 20:09:22

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#74 2014-01-06 20:24:08

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

#75 2014-01-06 20:29:46

Re: Aur is a friggin mess, I propose either a serious cleanup or a whipe.

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