Your opinions on AUR

droog · 2005-05-14 00:13:06

I really liked people having personal repos and haven't liked seeing them disappear lately. I think the Aur is a good idea though, but i dont like how there are alot of people taking other peoples pkgbuilds and putting their name on them and submitting them to aur and getting credit for others work.
or submitting a shoddy pkgbuild when there is a better one in someones repo
I didnt vote though cause im too divided i guess.

miqorz · 2005-05-14 03:13:12

I don't use the AUR and really never plan to.

I keep a local repo of anything I dislike being done in the main repos and stuff that has not found it's way into the main repo. I have absolutely no desire to use other people's halfbaked PKGBUILDs or Packages.

dtw · 2005-05-14 06:24:01

I added a new option to the poll - i am also undecided

i just read this on the mailing list

I think some of the AUR contributors have too big of an ego. The AUR was created as a service to the contributors. For a long time the developers/TUs were created the PKGBUILDs themselves, without contributor support. The AUR allows contributors to more easily share their creations with the rest of the community. It's not like we "need"
the help

and he talks about ego?

i think the system that developed while we were waiting for the AUR was fine but that doesn't integrate well with the AUR now.

i think it will go far in the end but it needs lots of work - at the moment it is not getting enough support so it can;t grow but it does concern me that people are having doubts about the whole system that the devs don;t seem to be really addressing.

There is a general lack of communication and a bit of a chicken and egg situation developing

at the same time, and possibly more concerning, people are posting polls and comments about a system without actually having gone to the effort to find out how it is supposed to work - we can all see the problems inherent there

cactus · 2005-05-14 08:50:56

I was also a bit "turned up" at such a statement. I initially thought it to be just a heat of the moment type statement, but in reflection, it was the second such statement. So it seems like less of a fluke, and more of a stance. Be that as it may, I would hope it is not the predominant viewpoint of the TUR team, nor the Dev team.

I think this thread in general highlights the current gap between the community. Between those on the forums and in irc (general users), and those on the mailing lists (TURS, Devs, and some users).

I don't really know how to approach this gap. I have had some very constructive interaction with several members of the Dev team, and several TURs. However, I do see that the gap is widening. It seems fewer devs and Turs visit the forums and irc (see the op thread as a good example). Traffic on the mailing lists is not very heavy in its own right, at least not for those that I am aware of.

The forums still seem fairly active. Ideas seem to be presented on the forums for various things, like a security mailing list, some type of cvs information for the rss package feed on the main site, or a number of other things. These are just some ideas that I have discussed more recently. Yet, very little feedback seems to come from from the TURs and Devs, positive or otherwise.

I would like to state that I do appreciate all the work the Devs and the TURs do. I just honestly don't have a frame of reference for knowing what is being done. Sure, I do a pacman -Syu and a few packages get updated. That seems to be about all the interaction I have with most of the Devs and Turs at this point.

I would also like to say thanks to Dibble. He has brought up some issues that I have been noticing lately, and have had some mixed feelings about bringing forth for discussion. I feel bad for his timing, as he has recently submitted his application for being a TUR, and criticism, albiet constructive, is not always a way to engender votes, unfortunately. I would like to thank him for putting himself out on a limb for me as a user.

Anyway..Sorry for the aside. Probably just another instance of me running down a different street than everyone else..feel free to ignore me as you see fit, or turn me into a goat as required.

leeghoofd · 2005-05-14 11:05:40

Thanks phrakture for explaining! I will submit the mail idee to the bugtracker

I do not agree with you on one point, you say that if everyone can edit all PKGBUILDS that that will be a security issue. In my opinion it will not be more dangerous than it is now.
For instance if you have a system where everyone can submit new PKGBUILDS, there would be a list of all these PKGBUILDS and who wrote them. Than there is a TU who choses what PKGBUILD is save and can be added to communitiy. If for instance you are a TU and I'm a user, in this table you can see that you created a new version and putted it in testing. If I see that I can improve that I add a new version of the PKGBUILD but it wont be added to a reposatority until you (the TU) does that.

Reposatority Author      Version Votes
none            leeghoofd 3.0-2     1
testing         phrakture 3.0-1     5
community     phrakture 2.3-2    4
none            phrakture 2.3-1     3
none            phrakture 2.2-1     4

Or do you think this would make the AUR too complicated?

Cheers,
david

kcy29581 · 2005-05-14 21:24:35

thanks for adding the option dibble! I feel stupid for not adding it to begin with. :oops:

Moo-Crumpus · 2005-05-15 08:33:37

I still don't like the aurs that much because of different techniques you have to chose if you are interested in a package. As AUR is meant to be a set of filters between WWU and REPOSITORY, there could be one way for all packages in each filtered staging of the AUR: fetch a tarball with PKGBUILD and other Package files, including the package itself, and expand them into /var/abs/local/aur/<stage>. If I found it would be funny to compile all the stuff others have compiled already for themselves, I would propably have decided to use gentoo.

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.

dtw · 2005-05-15 10:55:05

Pink Chick - file those thoughts as request in the bug tracker please

Moo-Crumpus · 2005-05-15 15:28:25

Let me think my thoughts for some more days ...:idea:

medicated · 2005-05-16 16:19:48

I really like the idea of AUR, but I can see where people are seeing problems in the implementation. First off, I think that AUR is quite cumbersome to use, but that is expected as it is still in its early stages. I really think there needs to be some clear way to communicate with the maintainers of packages in AUR as well. Maybe there is and I missed it :shock: I've seen a few packages that I was interested in, tried..and then came up with problems. 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?

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.

ravster · 2005-05-16 22:00:26

medicated wrote:

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.

sweiss · 2005-06-09 05:12:54

I was wondering if it is possible to enable the uploading of a PKGBUILD through AUR, instead of packaging it first.

codergeek42 · 2005-06-09 05:36:35

I mus be missing out on something. What's AUR?
/me goes to check wiki

phrakture · 2005-06-09 05:49:01

codergeek42 wrote:

I mus be missing out on something. What's AUR?
/me goes to check wiki

aur.archlinux.org

codergeek42 · 2005-06-09 05:59:22

Thanks.

deficite · 2005-06-09 17:42:15

I agree with PinkChick that the AUR needs a simpler interface. I'd like to see a CLI for AUR with pacman-like functionality (search the PKGBUILDs and fetch them).

Dusty · 2005-06-09 17:46:14

http://wiki2.archlinux.org/index.php/aurbuild
http://wiki2.archlinux.org/index.php/aurscrape

deficite · 2005-06-09 18:03:05

Gratias tibi ago.

Blind · 2005-06-14 08:56:47

Easy, commentable, fast, maintained by the users themselves - what more could you ask for?
Alright - in the forum even people who did not use the software often made comments on how to improve the PKGBUILD. It should be made really clear that it is USER maintained and therefore vulnarable, meaning: errors will happen (on purpose or not).
But I think it is a very good way to decentralize work and distribute it over the community. Good job.
Blind

pjmattal · 2005-06-14 12:24:54

.. I'd like to say that I just read this thread. The whole thing. Didn't know it existed until now.

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

Dusty · 2005-06-14 14:37:18

Nice words, Paul!

Dusty

Arch Linux

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