Arch Linux

sweiss

Member

Registered: 2004-02-16

Posts: 635

Arch Maintainance Policy

This is some sort of a follow-up to the "Why is WINE so old" thread.

Unfortunately I was unable to reply to those who replied to my comment, before the thread was closed.
Anyway, what I really meant was this:

Obviously, there are several people who have interest in a single package.
It is indeed possible that a maintainer will be too busy to update it at a reasonable (that is subjective, I know) amount of time.

My question is: Is there a logistical/technological difficulty in allowing a package to have more than one maintainer, or is it so by convention?

Thanks for your input.

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Some PKGBUILDs: http://members.lycos.co.uk/sweiss3

dolby

Member

From: 1992

Registered: 2006-08-08

Posts: 1,581

Re: Arch Maintainance Policy

indeed WHINE is so old

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cactus

Taco Eater

From: ಠ_ರೃ

Registered: 2004-05-25

Posts: 4,611

Website

Re: Arch Maintainance Policy

The developer marked as the maintainer is the primary point of contact for that particular package.

More than one developer can certainly update a package if they wished.
However, the maintainer generally knows what is happening with their package. In some cases there is a reason why it has not been updated, such as: Upstream bug regression, new version will come out soon and it would be pointless to upgrade before then, known breakages in new version that are too deleterious to be viable, etc. Given that, many of the devs don't want to break things if they are not intimately familiar with the current state of the package.

So there is no real technical barrier, but there are real reasons why in some cases it may not be advisable. I am not saying this is, or is not, one of those cases. I have not really paid much attention to the WINE discussion since I don't use WINE for anything at all.

FYI: Starting a new thread on a closed issue is generally in bad taste. I replied to this one because I thought it was actually going in a new direction, as it included a question of package management policy. If it turns out to be just more "why isn't WINE updated yet" vitriol, then it will likely become locked as well, since that horse appears to be well flogged already.

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ಠ_ಠ
"Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept." -- Postel's Law
"tacos." -- Cactus' Law

sweiss

Member

Registered: 2004-02-16

Posts: 635

Re: Arch Maintainance Policy

This was certainly not my intention.
Thanks for your answer.

As far as I'm concerned, my question was answered, and if you believe this discussion is a flame bait, please close it.

Thanks again.

Last edited by sweiss (2008-04-29 19:50:14)

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Some PKGBUILDs: http://members.lycos.co.uk/sweiss3

JGC

Developer

Registered: 2003-12-03

Posts: 1,658

Re: Arch Maintainance Policy

Any maintainer can maintain any package at this moment, so that's not a problem. Sometimes we jump in for others when we see some important update or an important bugfix. The problem with wine is that it's i686-only. There's no way to get it working on amd64, other than using the bin32 stuff that is in AUR. If I would have to test a wine build, I would have to do an i686 build, adapt some AUR PKGBUILD to take my new wine build and use that bin32-wine package on my machine. Nowadays, I'm not the only dev around with x86_64 anymore. Most of the active devs are using a 64 bit system with 64 bit archlinux nowadays, which leaves us with a small amount of maintainers that has the knowledge and possibilities to maintain wine.

fancris3

Member

Registered: 2007-03-18

Posts: 67

Re: Arch Maintainance Policy

now i have an 686 but on x86_64 i build wine in chroot with a trick .
mv uname uname_1
and make a new uname
#!/bin/sh
uname_1 "$@"|sed -e's/x86_64/i686/'

oliwer

Member

From: Paris

Registered: 2007-06-30

Posts: 153

Website

Re: Arch Maintainance Policy

I noticed that some developers/TU have more than 100 packages to maintain ! This is not sane. I think the best way to keep all packages up to date is to recruit more packagers. It would also be nice if the core developers could spend their time working on important things (pacman, initscripts, devtools and all coding stuff) instead of losing time maintaining their collection of packages.

I suggest an "Archlinux recruitment & training summer session"

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⇨PKGBUILDs

Allan

Developer

From: Brisbane, AU

Registered: 2007-06-09

Posts: 9,939

Website

Re: Arch Maintainance Policy

Well, anyone is welcome to apply to be a TU.  I can't guarantee anything but...  if you maintain a few packages in the AUR and the PKGBUILDs look good then you will likely get elected.  We are always looking for people who are committed to helping Arch.

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