On Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Ray Kohler <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm the maintainer of the "surf" package in AUR, and I've discovered > an annoyance in the way I've created this package. I'd like some > advice on how to resolve it. > > This package is a web browser from suckless.org, the makers of dwm. It > has very much the same coding and build style, involving a config.h > file which the user is intended to customize. Most of surf's behavior > is decided at compile-time by this file. I've modeled my package after > the "dwm" package in community, copying the default config.h into the > root of the package tarball and listing it as a local source file. > build() then copies it into the unpacked source directory before > compiling. > > This is great for users of dwm who rebuild it from ABS, as it avoids > the need to modify build() in order to customize the package - the > user just needs to supply their own config.h and change the md5sum for > it. > > This doesn't work so well for my surf package, though, since that's in > the AUR. Many (most?) users of AUR packages are auto-updating with > helper-tools like yaourt, pbget, and similar utilities, and it's > difficult to automatically pull updates to package materials when > you've changed one of the files. customizepkg won't help you much > either, since that can only modify the PKGBUILD, and not the config.h. > > It's also annoying to me as the maintainer of the package. Anyone who > maintains a package that's meant to have the build customized, rather > than compiled as-is, will end up actually maintaining two copies - one > "stock" version to submit to AUR, and one customized version for > personal use. > > Obviously, none of these issues are show-stoppers. But they are > annoying, and I don't packages I maintain to annoy my end-users. What > can I do to make this package more comfortable for the average AUR > user? Is software that expects compile-time customization just > fundamentally not very compatible with the auto-update concept? >
dwm was one of the very few softwares I never used a PKGBUILD for and don't recommend using one. And the problem you just described is one of the reasons.
