You are not logged in.

#1 2006-08-02 19:52:34

tomk
Forum Fellow
From: Ireland
Registered: 2004-07-21
Posts: 9,839

Your AUR votes, and their effect

I'm looking for opinions here, not facts, or quotes from the guidelines. We have started a discussion on the AUR mailing list about AUR Voting, and AFAICS most Arch users are not on that list. I'd be grateful to anyone who takes the time to choose an answer, and express their feelings on this important topic.

TIA smile

Offline

#2 2006-08-02 19:58:37

phrakture
Arch Overlord
From: behind you
Registered: 2003-10-29
Posts: 7,879
Website

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

I feel that votes (should) provide like 60% of the reason to move the package to community, but the other chunk should be personal preference on the packagers part.

As a side note, there are a handful of AUR packages with loads of votes, but, due to licensing issues, cannot be placed in community.

Offline

#3 2006-08-02 21:31:09

arooaroo
Member
From: London, UK
Registered: 2005-01-13
Posts: 1,268
Website

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

Votes are clearly a clear indicator of packages in demand. However, as Phrak says, it shouldn't be the only factor.

One obvious issue is that a TU shouldn't hold back in upgrading AUR pkgbuild to Community if it's a package that they are interested in maintaining. I seem to recall dtw urging to vote for a pkgbuild he stuck on the AUR so that it reached the quota for him to get the all-clear to promote it!

Offline

#4 2006-08-02 21:39:59

dtw
Forum Fellow
From: UK
Registered: 2004-08-03
Posts: 4,439
Website

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

That's a personal preference on my part though, aroo.  I personally didn't want to overload [community] with pet projects because I wouldn't like to see other people doing that.  I don't think anyone has done that though.  Similarly I won't add the whole AEGIS repo to [community], even though it would be hugely convenient for me.

I also like to get the [community] involved and actually value their opinion.  Call it laziness - I didn't want to add the ati pkg to [community] if no one was going to use it because I certianly didn't need it!  Hope that makes sense, it's late...

Offline

#5 2006-08-02 22:54:55

test1000
Member
Registered: 2005-04-03
Posts: 834

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

About how packages get into community i agree with phrak, but i think it would be more productive to think about why we can't just put ALL packages into community which would in no doubt be a nice thing smile

So i just checked the stats:

There are 834 packages in community whereas there are only 18 TU's ...

that's 46 packages on each TU not to mention probably some/all of them also have packages in extra?

There's 7 days to the week. 6+x packages to check/update each day.

That doesn't sound THAT bad and ofc this would be easier if we had a tool that notified US(package maintainers) when a new version was out instead of us having to check the website regurarly. (hmm maybe just lynx diff websiteold websitenew script ? smile) Maybe som people already have such a script, because this would in no doubt save time.

Ofcourse, I, like most would want to see as many packages in binary repositories as possible but now I think it would be OK if mostly packages that would take a long time to compile would be in the repos and small ones be left in the AUR if the TU number don't increase dramatically.

Such a situation would only be acceptable though, I feel, if downloading and searching AUR would seamlessly & transparently be implemented directly into pacman, it needn't be a security problem either if one could only download(but still search and override this feature ofc?) packages which were marked SAFE.

I suppose the best solution would be to just get more TU's, but maybe that is a pipe-dream. Thoughts?


KISS = "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." - Albert Einstein

Offline

#6 2006-08-03 01:45:01

barebones
Member
Registered: 2006-04-30
Posts: 235

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

Hopefully this isn't too OT, but in reply to what test1000 said, I have a little script that tells you when websites are updated. I haven't released it because it compairs rss feeds, which are not standardized in anyway. You have to add a new function to process each new xml feed, so unless you know a little about python and xml its not very useful. I don't have it hosted anywhere right now, but If your interested I'll put it up somewhere.

Offline

#7 2006-08-03 02:04:54

neotuli
Lazy Developer
From: London, UK
Registered: 2004-07-06
Posts: 1,204
Website

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

frugalware makes a couple hacks to pacman to get the kind of functionality test1000 is talking about. Worth noting smile


The suggestion box only accepts patches.

Offline

#8 2006-08-03 07:21:20

dtw
Forum Fellow
From: UK
Registered: 2004-08-03
Posts: 4,439
Website

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

There's 7 days to the week. 6+x packages to check/update each day.

LOL - speaking of getting more TUs...I'm not sure that's a selling point!  The reality is nowehere near that though as many of those pkgs are rarely, if ever, updated.  Most really current pkgs with strong, continuing development get snapped up in to [extra] pretty quick, which is the way it should be IMO. big_smile

Offline

#9 2006-08-03 16:01:44

phrakture
Arch Overlord
From: behind you
Registered: 2003-10-29
Posts: 7,879
Website

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

barebones wrote:

Hopefully this isn't too OT, but in reply to what test1000 said, I have a little script that tells you when websites are updated. I haven't released it because it compairs rss feeds, which are not standardized in anyway. You have to add a new function to process each new xml feed, so unless you know a little about python and xml its not very useful. I don't have it hosted anywhere right now, but If your interested I'll put it up somewhere.

I'm interested.  Especially if it's able to check/grok version information from freshmeat/berlios/sourceforge... that'd rock.

Offline

#10 2006-08-03 17:32:50

Cerebral
Forum Fellow
From: Waterloo, ON, CA
Registered: 2005-04-08
Posts: 3,108
Website

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

test1000 wrote:

that's 46 packages on each TU not to mention probably some/all of them also have packages in extra?

Couple of notes - first, that average is off, because WillySilly's got a ton of packages in there, enough that it would seriously throw off any mean calculation.

Secondly, TUs have absolutely no access to [extra] - that's for the devs, a couple of which do happen to be TUs as well.

Offline

#11 2006-08-03 17:51:55

barebones
Member
Registered: 2006-04-30
Posts: 235

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

Phrakture, I have to warn you, I'm a noob when it comes to programming, so it's by no means polished and refined code. After taking a look at sourceforge's rss feeds however, it does look like it can be modified to check for version numbers pretty easily. I think I'll post it up on the wiki, with some stuff about how to use it. Maybe others will follow my lead and we can have a section there where people post their cool scripts?

Edit: The script can be found here

Offline

#12 2006-08-03 18:33:55

test1000
Member
Registered: 2005-04-03
Posts: 834

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

Couple of notes - first, that average is off, because WillySilly's got a ton of packages in there, enough that it would seriously throw off any mean calculation.

hehe big_smile all hail WillySilly


KISS = "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." - Albert Einstein

Offline

#13 2006-08-03 22:40:51

elasticdog
Member
From: Washington, USA
Registered: 2005-05-02
Posts: 995
Website

Re: Your AUR votes, and their effect

I've been reading the procedings on the TU mailing list and my thought is this.  From the user's standpoint, the more things that are in community the better...

That about sums it up, but I think that if a TU has an interest in certain projects or packages, by all means why not put them in community regardless of their popularity?  If they are willing to spend the time maintaining them, nobody loses anything because of it.  If there are TU's looking for more packages to maintain, then yes, popularity would be a good sign of ones to choose, but that shouldn't stop them from maintaining other things as well.  As it has been said on the mailing list, there shouldn't be a set number of votes required and it should be left to common sense and each TU's judgement to determine what is actually wanted and what would be wasting their time.  IMHO

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB