All, I wanted to repost this here, because I feel it might be interesting to everyone. Comments, as always, welcome and encouraged.
It is my response to the forum thread at: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?t=12352&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 Best, - P *** .. 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 _______________________________________________ arch mailing list [email protected] http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
