November 2023 - Aur-general - lists.archlinux.org

Packages for a simple symbolic link?
by Ralf Mardorf 05 Dec '23

05 Dec '23

Hi, I came across the following packages purely by chance. https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=cachy-browser-firefo… https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=librewolf-firefox-sh… Should I submit a deletion request? IMO it's strange to build a package just for a link. Regards, Ralf

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Application to become a package maintainer
by Jakub Klinkovský 03 Dec '23

03 Dec '23

Hey everyone, I'm sending my application to become a package maintainer, which is kindly sponsored by Sven (svenstaro) and Frederik (freswa). ## Who I am My name is Jakub, but I'm mostly known as Lahwaacz online. I've been an Arch wiki admin since 2014 and also created the man.archlinux.org project. In real life, I have scientific background and I'm interested in programming, automation and infrastructure. I write Python, C++ and CUDA (no Rust yet :-(). ## What I want to do I want to help with package maintenance in two general areas that are closest to me: 1. Due to my background, I'm using many weird scientific packages (almost) daily, including cuda, openmpi, vtk, paraview and more. Most of these are notorious for breaking often and I'd have to deal with this anyway, so I might as well directly co-maintain them. 2. As a wiki admin I could co-maintain some wiki-related packages, both for users and for backend deployment. The Arch wiki is based on MediaWiki which is currently deployed from a single git mono-repository that contains all necessary extensions (either bundled or as git submodules) but we would like to eventually use Arch packages for MediaWiki and its extensions. This is a long-term goal for me, however, since I have yet to learn how to do PHP packaging properly... I may find also other areas where to invest my packaging time, but overall I imagine myself maintaining a small-ish number of packages and focusing on quality rather than quantity. ## Disclaimers First, I think it is fair to acknowledge that I do not plan to deal with handling AUR requests, which is still associated to the role of a package maintainer. Dealing with the wiki is hard and time consuming in itself and I don't have the capacity to add another similarly exhausting responsibility. I like Python as a language, but I dislike Python packaging and I don't see myself maintaining many Python packages in the future. I might change my opinion, though, since I would really love to see jupyterhub in the official repos: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/jupyterhub ## My packages My AUR packages: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?SeB=m&K=lahwaacz I also maintain an unofficial [jlk] repo which contains many other AUR packages that I use: https://jlk.fjfi.cvut.cz/arch/repo.html Feel free to bombard me with any questions or package reviews :-) Best regards, Jakub / Lahwaacz

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Missing introduction to AUR
by Glyn Normington 28 Nov '23

28 Nov '23

Having only recently encountered AUR after a year or two of using arch, I wonder if the landing page https://aur.archlinux.org/ could include some introductory information or a link to the introduction on the wiki ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_User_Repository). Regards, Glyn

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Re: Requests and the etiquette involved
by Lime In a Jacket (Aaron Liu) 23 Nov '23

23 Nov '23

I, for one, have never heard of using “w” as “without”. W much, much commonly means “with”. > On Nov 22, 2023, at 9:31 AM, Björn Bidar <bjorn.bidar(a)thaodan.de> wrote: > > > Hey, > > I fully agree with that statement. The automated checks can only go so > far. > Of course there are cases where the package has been out of date for > longer, however even in such cases the packager might have forgotten to > update the package after he got the request or there was an issue on > their side. > E.g. on case I did an update but forgot to push it. > > I also noticed that more users use out-of-date flags as a way to bug the > maintainer of a package for attention. > > I had a package teams-for-linux-wbunbled-electron that was simply > deleted/merged after such a request because the author of the request > didn't understood what w as in without means. > > I would favor that before a request is send the user should try to send > a comment or request simply shouldn't be automatically accepted before > the user has time to reply e.g. after at least a week to reply. > Sometimes it feels like users except that there is an update at day 1. > > Br, > > Björn

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About user MarsSeed's script-like mass requests
by 7Ji 21 Nov '23

21 Nov '23

My opinion on this first: I'm not against his intention to clean AUR. I'm against using some self-written scripts to mass-file requests to certain packages just based on t heir traits, like keywords, names, or whatever. I'm also against doing so by hand, which is basically using yourself as a request machine. I think most of us would agree that every request, no matter they're for orphan, merge, or deletion, need to be thought carefully and sent with details associated close ly with it. And blindly filing them just adds burden to PMs as this leaves research to be done to PMs. The direct reason I want to post this is reading following requests: PRQ#51267[1], PRQ#51269[2], PRQ#51270[3] and PRQ#51271[4], these affects armcl-opencl[5], arm-linux -gnueabihf-armcl-neon[6], aarch64-linux-gnu-armcl-opencl+neon[7] and aarch64-linux-gnu-armcl-neon[8] accordingly. If you take a look at the packages, you could clearly see they're for cross-compiling on an x86_64 ArchLinux host to an ARM target. These are just like aarch64-linux-gn u-gcc, arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc, etc in the official repos, and they have useful functionality like opencl and neon support. But how did MarsSeed write his deletion requests? Each of them are simply just the following message copy and pasted, and there're more, tens of, if not hundreds of oth er requests with pasted detail same as them: > ARM-only packages belong to ArchLinuxARM.org repos, not AUR: > > https://archlinuxarm.org/packages > > https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=2675 > https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=4 > > AUR is primarily for Arch Linux, so packages here must work with the > x86_64 architecture: > https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_package_guidelines#Architectures I think we could say these requests are clearly filed by some automated process that's triggered on any package with arm or aarch64 keywords. But the process catches wr ong targets and these requests would result in either wrongly deleted packages or increased labor for PMs to read the PKGBUILDs by themselves before rejecting them. This is not right. This, an automated request filing process, should not be the way a user files their package requests. If an automated process just catches all packag es with some traits and filing requests is acceptable, then why is a user needed in the process at all? The user account is just like an API key for a bot program in that case. And if doing so is acceptable, why not just give the script or whatever tech behind the automated process to PMs so they can even save the time needed to check requests list? Still, I appreciate the amount of time MarsSeed put previously on clearing the AUR. I think there might be ~10k requests filed by him ever since he joined AUR (based on a simple search of 'MarsSeed [1]' in the aur-requests mailing list), and I'd like to see him continuing on his work, but not in such robotic way.

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Requests and the etiquette involved
by Lex Black 21 Nov '23

21 Nov '23

Good evening, what happened to the general etiquette in trying to contact someone before submitting requests? It's all nice and fair if someone wants to help clean up the AUR. And it's also the case that one of my (now ex-)packages is a candidate for deletion/merging, if the replacement is able to replace it. If being the keyword. I wanted to do that when the new package is able to replace the old and therefore I was still the maintainer. And to my surprise someone filed recently a merge request. Not that I was contacted before that someone took action. Didn't say a thing, because, as I said, this request has a point and wasn't sure if arguing to keep it is worth the hassle. But today came the next surprise. An orphan request with the words "Orphaning to facilitate quicker merging to papermerge-core.". Which got granted and subsequently taken by the new "maintainer". Again without trying to contact me beforehand. And that was the final straw. It left me speechless and upset. I get now why this was automatically accepted albeit being an active participant on the AUR. Again.. The PKGBUILD in question is on balance time. What matters to me more and what I am upset about is the behaviour in question. Before I make a request and the package has still an owner I try to contact them or at least make sure they are inactive. But that isn't important anymore? This is at least the third time were a PKGBUILD, where of the time being I was the active maintainer, got some request which was granted without an effort in communicating before. This felt really disrespectful. There is time and effort involved in helping actively on the aurweb and then someone comes through, not caring that there is an active maintainer who might have to say something on the topic and does whatever someone thinks. What the hell? This is, at least as far as I know, not how a community works. But maybe I'm wrong. Whatever. This is of my chest now. tl;dr: I wish, all people that go through packages to achieve a cleaner aurweb, would pay attention to the maintainer field on the aurweb and act accordingly. Best regards

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about translating certain words
by zoorat 18 Nov '23

18 Nov '23

hi, I was planning to translate AURweb and archwiki into Bangla. but got into a problem. sorry if I missed this info in the wiki. while reading badly translated https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman_(%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%82%E0%A6%… I got confused about how to translate the word "update". because, in Bangla, most people say the word "update" as is but the direct translation would be "হালনাগাদ"(Hālanāgād). I only ever saw people using the word halnagad inside some schoolbooks, not in real life... there are a lot of words like this where we use the English word more than the Bangla word. as it's rare to find documentation in Bangla, I don't know how other people do those. and most Bangla machine translation is just bad. so, my question is do I translate it to casual Bangla (how people normally talk even in formal situations), or hardcore pure Bangla translation ?? in my opinion, it's better to keep it how people normally talk. have a nice day. -- yours zoorat, PGP: 00000586360F8791A5492251129802DDA8074345 GITHUB: https://github.com/z00rat

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Re: got a laptop 🙂
by zoorat 14 Nov '23

14 Nov '23

hi, thanks a lot for the answers. idk why i didn't get your email in the digest, so i will it mail like this... > Maybe instead of trying to delete everything which is unmaintained you > should start adopting it and then maintaining it? i was just trying to help cleanup AUR. didn't mean any harm. i wrote some script myself to help me do this. i do pick up packages that look like people use. > David, I believe they meant should orphaned old packages be deleted for > not being up to date and not actively maintained, if so see above. > > If I am wrong, feel free to correct me Zoorat. see my answer: https://lists.archlinux.org/hyperkitty/list/aur-general@lists.archlinux.org… > In general, a lot of people prefer diff in comments (I believe this is > discouraged by package maintainers, but I can't fully remember) or > emailing a patch. This means that there is no privacy concerns. sure, i will do this then > As a general note, "glibc" does not need to be specified as a > dependency as it is within the "base" package, and thus installed on > system, it doesn't hurt to specify it however. i added that because of namcap. > I only briefly looked through each of the packages, this is in no way > an indepth analysis, it already took me a good hour to look though each > one above, I suggesting specifying specific ones you want checked > indepth instead of the long process of checking each one. thanks a lot. i will fix up everything as soon as possible. > I will be brutally honest here (please do not take anything I say as a > personal insult), although I am a regular user, I will explain how this > works (You could also read: sorry, i wasn't trying to be an asshole who just wants the title to show off. i added those numbers not to flex but to help determine. but as i read my own email now, it's looks stupid. please let me explain for the full context, my first contribution to AUR was a deletion req because the package i was trying to install was broken and thought it would be a good idea to report this to maintainers. googled about it and saw people talking about deletion request. after that i, found some other broken packages and reported them. it was the time of covid, so i had a lot of time on hand, thus i started to seek broken packages. i tested them and commented/mailed them to fix or reported them for deletion. at that time i started to maintain some packages too. i wanted to be a TU because i thought i could help test and validate other people's deletion requests. as my req would take quite a while, i thought i could be useful. nothing else. after reporting 500+ `ros-jade-*` broken packages, @ainola mailed me to thank me for the help. and i asked him about being a TU. he said my account was young at that time and to keep helping them... the last email was just to get know about my state... sorry for my english. > Maintaining a few packages isn't generally enough, have you submitted > bugs? have you tried joining the Arch Testing Team and testing packages > and submitting issues, or even patches to the packages to fix them? i have reported bug before in bugzilla and joining the test team sounds fun :) > Your account might not be young, but you have disappeared for a year... > you can't just leave for a few years pop back and say "look my account > is old now". Every package maintainer put ridiculous amounts of time > into their role before they were even considered. i wasn't active on the mailing list or irc but i was maintaining my packages. i didn't mean to disrespect any maintainer here. > But say you got outstanding activity, do you have the skill? Have you > showed the ability to package pragmatically? Most of your packages are > very straight forward and easy to follow the guidelines, but this is > not always the case. this is the reason i wasn't very interested in maintaining packages at first... and i don't adopt complex c/c++ based packages for this reason but started to get out of my comfort zone nowadays > Its very childish to say, "hey I maintain a few packages, and my > account is older now, can I have a job", something I learnt to ask > myself is "Why should I be picked?", and yes when I ask myself that in > the context of becoming a package maintainer its "hell no". i didn't mean to disrespect any maintainer here. i just wanted to help test the deletion requests of other people. nothing else. > In other words, stop trying so hard to become a package maintainer, and > focus on actually contributing, the rest comes later. sure. it's not like i will just stop contributing here because i see myself being a maintainer. i wanna help with the open source project i use, that's why i contribute in AUR. > Anyways, I have wrote a lot, and I have spent way too many hours doing > so, but I hope there is at least some usual information here for you :) i'm really really grateful for your answers. helped me a lot. have a nice day. p.s. english is not my first language. ask me anything if it confuses you. -- yours zoorat, PGP: 00000586360F8791A5492251129802DDA8074345 GITHUB: https://github.com/z00rat

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attention needed about 'acmt-*'
by zoorat 14 Nov '23

14 Nov '23

hi, i stumble upon 28 packages with the name 'acmt*' link: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages?O=0&SeB=nd&K=acmt all of those packages, - doesn't have `checksum=` - doesn't have `source=` - sources inside `prepare()` like `_archive="`xdg-user-dir DOWNLOAD`/acm-plugins-*.tar.gz"` - are orphan - 0 votes, 0 popularity - no download instruction tried to build some of them, but they had some .so files. i'm not sure if it's allowed to have packages like this. if you have time, look into it. have a nice day. -- yours zoorat, PGP: 00000586360F8791A5492251129802DDA8074345 GITHUB: https://github.com/z00rat

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Re: got a laptop
by zoorat 13 Nov '23

13 Nov '23

sure, i will do that if it works already picked up some pkgs like that :) and what if its broken ?? On 11/13/23 10:32, aur(a)nullvoid.me wrote: > I feel most users just want it to work, instead of maintaining it properly. So if you see out of date packages over 2-3 year that still "work" why not try to adopt them, instead of deleting them. -- yours zoorat, PGP: 00000586360F8791A5492251129802DDA8074345 GITHUB: https://github.com/z00rat

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