Arch Linux

Amanda S

Member

Registered: 2013-09-21

Posts: 276

Website

Unofficial maintainers

I just got an AMD card and I can't play X-Plane 10 if I'm using the open source driver, so I went to the wiki and found this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AMD_Catalyst

However, there's no official packages in the default Arch repo's, and here's a message of the unofficial repositories page:

Warning: Neither the official Arch Linux Developers nor the Trusted Users perform tests of any sort to verify the contents of these repositories; it is up to each user to decide whether to trust their maintainers, and take full responsibility for whatever their decision brings.

If these packages are recommended in the Wiki and (it seems) no one has had any problems regarding malicious issues with the maintainer/packages, why isn't "Vi0L0" an official maintainer of this package, or at least a trusted user? This way, we, the paranoid people, could trust things a little more and not lose sleep because of such simple things.

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If it ain't broke, you haven't tweaked it enough...

Xabre

Member

From: Serbia

Registered: 2009-03-19

Posts: 752

Re: Unofficial maintainers

Unless you know Arch developers personally, each single one, what makes them so different?
The truth is, the only merit I follow when determining the quality of the software or packaging before I use it are user comments.I couldn't care less for titles or the exact location from which software I download comes -if it has been verified as good-.
Vi0L0 does a pretty damn fine job, IMO, and many people share the same view.

Catalyst was dropped out of official repositories for a good reason. To be able to work, it always requires quirks and major hustle, often requires older versions of X and whatnot, which is simply against Arch Way: no other package should be stalled simply because AMD driver developers are unable to follow the rest of the graphics/kernel stack.

ANOKNUSA

Member

Registered: 2010-10-22

Posts: 2,141

Re: Unofficial maintainers

This way, we, the paranoid people, could trust things a little more and not lose sleep because of such simple things.

You could always download and inspect the package yourself prior to installing it, or just package Catalyst and the requisite version of Xorg yourself, with a PKGBUILD you wrote from scratch. Of course Catalyst is a closed-source binary driver, so there's no way for you to know whether there's malicious code in it anyway.

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Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 11,607

Re: Unofficial maintainers

If these packages are recommended in the Wiki and (it seems) no one has had any problems regarding malicious issues with the maintainer/packages, why isn't "Vi0L0" an official maintainer of this package, or at least a trusted user? This way, we, the paranoid people, could trust things a little more and not lose sleep because of such simple things.

It's not a matter of Vi0L0 not being a TU, Catalyst is not in the repos because it lags behind xorg too much, potentially holding back updates. Until this changes, Catalyst will not be in the repos.