9 ms·

Who helps your Linux distribution run smoothly? Thank a packager today

215 points by Tsiolkovsky 13y ago

keenerd 13y ago
Hey Arch-folk! Top requests for AUR packages you'd like to see brought into the [community] repository? edit: Or previously unavailable software that should be in the AUR?
- 616c 13y ago
  Just keep doing what you guys are doing (started using Arch after years of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, in order of preference). I am hooked. Thanks for finding the sweetspot between things I like with FreeBSD/Gentoo/Debian in terms of packaging and philosophy.
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    hehe, came here to thank the arch team[s], I've been smooth sailing for a few years on top of their creation.
    - hrkristian 13y ago
      Oh. yeah. They deserve thanks times a million in my book. They and the rest of the open source community, but OSS didn't feel as great before as it does after I made the switch. [fanboyism intensifies]
      - agumonkey 13y ago
        Right, thanks are upstream recursively transitive.
- bretthoerner 13y ago
  I just looked at my AUR list and most are non-free. A couple popular standouts that are free: shutter, vagrant, gradle, leiningen, apache-ivy, jq
  - arunc 13y ago
    Another archer here, since the 2009.
  - sentenza 13y ago
    I'd add bittorrent-sync. Encrypted, de-centralized Dropbox replacement.
    - bretthoerner 13y ago
      That isn't free (as in open source), so I left that out.
      - sentenza 13y ago
        Fair enough. They claim to be thinking about open sourcing it, so there may be hope yet.
        nodata 13y ago
        Meanwhile... https://github.com/calmh/syncthing https://github.com/calmh/syncthing
  - dontdieych 13y ago
    shutter +1
- zhemao 13y ago
  The arduino package has been sitting in the AUR for an oddly long time given its relative popularity. I've been waiting for it to go into [community] but it hasn't so far.
- zanny 13y ago
  Heres basically all the free "small" (<10MB~) packages I could find in my aur installs: android-sdk-platform-tools archlinux-artwork audiothumbs bup darkplaces dolphin-box-plugin(-git) eduke32 firefox-aurora firefox-beta(-bin) firefox-nightly fontconfig-infinality freedoom freetype2-infinality glmark2 google-talkplugin grive gzdoom hexen2 kcm-ufw kcmsystemd kde-servicemenus-imgur kde-thumbnailer-epub kdeconnect kdeplasma-applets-veromix kup lib32-sdl_mixer lib32-simplescreenrecorder lib32-smpeg libjpeg6 libx11-ldpreloadnograb mprime nwn-gog openoffice-thumbnail-plugin php-dio plasma-mediacenter qgears2 qt5-jsbackend simplescreenrecorder speedtest-cli tor-browser-en transfusion ttf-neverwinter ubuntu-mono yamagi-quake2 zandronum These packages are also in that group, but all have huge package sizes so I imagine that would contribute to their exclusion (mostly due to bundling image or sound data): android-ndk android-sdk caledonia-bundle eduke32-dukeplus humanity-icon-theme kdeartwork-sounds kdeplasma-applets-starfield-wallpaper ksplash-archpaint2 light-themes openarena qt5-examples wallpaper-archpaint2 These are proprietary, or are only used by proprietary software, but to me seem to fall in the same class as Steam / Flash / etc, in that they are all at least freeware. binkplayer btsync btsync-autoconfig desura dropbox hon honpurple minecraft minecraft-server spideroak "Top" would be most of the kde stuff and all the foss id-tech engines for games. Though I imagine the reason none of them are in is due to some licensing reasons concerning the game data, though it is worth mentioning the demo data for most of those games is also in the AUR. And simplescreenrecorder. Best desktop screencasting software I've ever used, wondering why its in the AUR.
- nextos 13y ago
  Thanks for the awesome work to all Arch packagers. I really think isync deserves being brought to [community]. It's an awesome IMAP syncing tool created by the same guy who coded mutt and used by a lot of people. It really deserves moving to [community] to get to a wider audience. IMHO it's much better than offlineimap.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  git-annex would be great! I've come to depend on it heavily for managing all my media files (pictures, music, video, etc.). I currently maintain the git-annex-bin package in the AUR[0], which uses the official binary, but that's compiled for Debian and has issues on Arch. For people who want to use git-annex on Arch, the choices are either (1) use this buggy binary, or (2) install cabal and a bunch of Haskell stuff[1], just to compile from source. [0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/git-annex-bin/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/git-annex-bin/ [1] which requires adding a separate repository, since Haskell is no longer in the main repos, and also installing a bunch of Haskell libraries that aren't in the AUR.
  - 616c 13y ago
    It is my experience with Haskell Arch packages, as the lack of forum feedback suggested to me, with my troubles with dependencies for pandoc or git-annex-bin,[0] to go and cabal it.[1] That is just me. I know that goes against the point of this whole post, but I wanted to learn more about Haskell and part of that for me was leaving the farm and running wild, so to speak. [0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/haskell-setenv https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/haskell-setenv [1]https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=173781 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=173781
    - nemetroid 13y ago
      This is my experience as well, and the person who maintains "ghc/cabal-install/and the other haskell packages in [extra]" had a similar sentiment in a reddit thread[1] eight months ago. Cabal is able to give you enough headaches on its own. :-) I do love pacman and the Arch package database in most other regards, however. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1f26hg/why_does_haskell_suck_on_arch/ca6wt0c
- viraptor 13y ago
  Vagrant!
- ginko 13y ago
  It would be great if glfw2 were in community. While I like Arch's philosophy of always being on the cutting edge and making the glfw package be GLFW 3.0, I think it would be good if GLFW 2.x stayed in the official repositories for a while as a separate package. The two packages don't interfere with each other. It's basically the same situation as with SDL 2 and 3.
- gillianseed 13y ago
  How about 'packjpg' for AUR, it's an open source lossless JPEG compressor which gives ~20-25% compression, the resulting compressed files are either stored as single (.pjg) files or as archives (.pja) which can then be decompressed back into the original jpeg files. http://www.elektronik.htw-aalen.de/packjpg/ http://www.elektronik.htw-aalen.de/packjpg/
- aw3c2 13y ago
  aarddict as offline wiki reader gpa, the gnu privacy assistant qgis is free GIS gimagereader is nice OCR
zdw 13y ago
If you're a developer, try to package your own things for the distros you care about. And accept patches that fix packaging issues. Think about how much easier your ops friends, and the continuous integration systems and similar will have it if all they have to do is run an "apt get" or "port install" to get a fully built version of your code. Things that help: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package https://wiki.debian.org/IntroDebianPackaging https://wiki.debian.org/IntroDebianPackaging http://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.creating-portfile.html http://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.creating-portf... http://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/guide.html http://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/guide.html http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/creating.html http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/creating.html
- massysett 13y ago
  Shouldn't packaging be left to each distributor's experts? As a developer of software you're an expert in whatever your software does--web server, calculator, compiler, whatever. There is no way you can be an expert in your software's functionality and in packaging, especially for more than one distribution. I'm always wary of installing packages not provided by my distribution, just because I have more faith that my distribution's packagers know how to package and they are more likely to use QA processes that will catch packaging bugs. I'd rather compile from source than install third-party packages; I can make my own rudimentary package that would be woefully inadequate for general use but that is perfectly sufficient for my needs.
  - blueblob 13y ago
    I think that depends. ArchLinux packages are almost just bash scripts. People can request fixes. I am sure when you first started programming you weren't an expert and that same logic applies to making packages. Multiple distributions you may be right. I suppose it is fair enough that you would want to install third party packages from source but with most package managers I would guess you could download the package and look at how it is built or at least what files it contains. Using packages can make cleaning up a bad package easier.
patcon 13y ago
Or ask them to join Gittip! After they're signed up, others will be able to start giving them recurring weekly gifts that are totally anonymous and categorically no-strings-attached. It's like a DFTBA grant. Disclaimer: I've taken 4 months off work to help work on the platform.
rdtsc 13y ago
This cannot be overstated, I have heard during conferences packagers being made fun of, something to the effect of "they are so cute, they don't understand our problems". To me it seem some are stuck between a rock and a hard place -- distro requirements vs application specific (vendor) requirements. So vendor likes to bundle specific library .so in the package or compiles external modules as static. Distro requirement, for security reasons for example, disallow that. Packager is left in the middle trying to reconcile the differences between the two. I have seen people stop maintaining their packages. Yeah sometimes there is nothing you can do and the latest coolest database or web browser or game just can't easily go into the main distro. But also I can't tell you how happy I have been in the past if a library I wanted to use was in the repo and I could just to an apt-get or yum install and all that is due to someone putting the work into doing that. Now instead of packaging it myself, building it, I saved a lot of time.
eplumlee 13y ago
Don't just thank them. If you cannot support with your time, send them new hardware and beer.
abruzzi 13y ago
I thank my packager by paying them ~$12k a year for "support".
xfalcox 13y ago
After being forced to use a non Debian distro at new servers at work (SLES) I am so proud of Ubuntu packaging community.
- TallGuyShort 13y ago
  Debian does have an impressive list of packages, but I'd rather use Zypper than Apt any day. It's the only mainstream package manager that actually lets you choose what to do when a dependency can't be satisfied or there's a version mismatch.
caycep 13y ago
could they have used a better example than MUMPS tho....yes, I know it works with its peculiar brand of duct tape, chewing gum and baling wire, but still...
jude- 13y ago
I'm lazy when it comes to these things, so I use FPM. It's great if you're dealing with RPM and .deb packages (and a few others). I saw someone else (vacri) mention it in this thread, but it definitely deserves consideration if you want to side-step setting up a packaging environment. Link: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
ksk 13y ago
To me, its rather sad that we still have to rely on multiple third party apps for dependency management - something that a modern OS should have baked into its core branch.

215 points by Tsiolkovsky 13y ago

Hey Arch-folk! Top requests for AUR packages you'd like to see brought into the [community] repository? edit: Or previously unavailable software that should be in the AUR?

616c 13y ago
Just keep doing what you guys are doing (started using Arch after years of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, in order of preference). I am hooked. Thanks for finding the sweetspot between things I like with FreeBSD/Gentoo/Debian in terms of packaging and philosophy.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  hehe, came here to thank the arch team[s], I've been smooth sailing for a few years on top of their creation.
  - hrkristian 13y ago
    Oh. yeah. They deserve thanks times a million in my book. They and the rest of the open source community, but OSS didn't feel as great before as it does after I made the switch. [fanboyism intensifies]
    - agumonkey 13y ago
      Right, thanks are upstream recursively transitive.
bretthoerner 13y ago
I just looked at my AUR list and most are non-free. A couple popular standouts that are free: shutter, vagrant, gradle, leiningen, apache-ivy, jq
- arunc 13y ago
  Another archer here, since the 2009.
- sentenza 13y ago
  I'd add bittorrent-sync. Encrypted, de-centralized Dropbox replacement.
  - bretthoerner 13y ago
    That isn't free (as in open source), so I left that out.
    - sentenza 13y ago
      Fair enough. They claim to be thinking about open sourcing it, so there may be hope yet.
      - nodata 13y ago
        Meanwhile... https://github.com/calmh/syncthing https://github.com/calmh/syncthing
- dontdieych 13y ago
  shutter +1
zhemao 13y ago
The arduino package has been sitting in the AUR for an oddly long time given its relative popularity. I've been waiting for it to go into [community] but it hasn't so far.
zanny 13y ago
Heres basically all the free "small" (<10MB~) packages I could find in my aur installs: android-sdk-platform-tools archlinux-artwork audiothumbs bup darkplaces dolphin-box-plugin(-git) eduke32 firefox-aurora firefox-beta(-bin) firefox-nightly fontconfig-infinality freedoom freetype2-infinality glmark2 google-talkplugin grive gzdoom hexen2 kcm-ufw kcmsystemd kde-servicemenus-imgur kde-thumbnailer-epub kdeconnect kdeplasma-applets-veromix kup lib32-sdl_mixer lib32-simplescreenrecorder lib32-smpeg libjpeg6 libx11-ldpreloadnograb mprime nwn-gog openoffice-thumbnail-plugin php-dio plasma-mediacenter qgears2 qt5-jsbackend simplescreenrecorder speedtest-cli tor-browser-en transfusion ttf-neverwinter ubuntu-mono yamagi-quake2 zandronum These packages are also in that group, but all have huge package sizes so I imagine that would contribute to their exclusion (mostly due to bundling image or sound data): android-ndk android-sdk caledonia-bundle eduke32-dukeplus humanity-icon-theme kdeartwork-sounds kdeplasma-applets-starfield-wallpaper ksplash-archpaint2 light-themes openarena qt5-examples wallpaper-archpaint2 These are proprietary, or are only used by proprietary software, but to me seem to fall in the same class as Steam / Flash / etc, in that they are all at least freeware. binkplayer btsync btsync-autoconfig desura dropbox hon honpurple minecraft minecraft-server spideroak "Top" would be most of the kde stuff and all the foss id-tech engines for games. Though I imagine the reason none of them are in is due to some licensing reasons concerning the game data, though it is worth mentioning the demo data for most of those games is also in the AUR. And simplescreenrecorder. Best desktop screencasting software I've ever used, wondering why its in the AUR.
nextos 13y ago
Thanks for the awesome work to all Arch packagers. I really think isync deserves being brought to [community]. It's an awesome IMAP syncing tool created by the same guy who coded mutt and used by a lot of people. It really deserves moving to [community] to get to a wider audience. IMHO it's much better than offlineimap.
chimeracoder 13y ago
git-annex would be great! I've come to depend on it heavily for managing all my media files (pictures, music, video, etc.). I currently maintain the git-annex-bin package in the AUR[0], which uses the official binary, but that's compiled for Debian and has issues on Arch. For people who want to use git-annex on Arch, the choices are either (1) use this buggy binary, or (2) install cabal and a bunch of Haskell stuff[1], just to compile from source. [0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/git-annex-bin/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/git-annex-bin/ [1] which requires adding a separate repository, since Haskell is no longer in the main repos, and also installing a bunch of Haskell libraries that aren't in the AUR.
- 616c 13y ago
  It is my experience with Haskell Arch packages, as the lack of forum feedback suggested to me, with my troubles with dependencies for pandoc or git-annex-bin,[0] to go and cabal it.[1] That is just me. I know that goes against the point of this whole post, but I wanted to learn more about Haskell and part of that for me was leaving the farm and running wild, so to speak. [0] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/haskell-setenv https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/haskell-setenv [1]https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=173781 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=173781
  - nemetroid 13y ago
    This is my experience as well, and the person who maintains "ghc/cabal-install/and the other haskell packages in [extra]" had a similar sentiment in a reddit thread[1] eight months ago. Cabal is able to give you enough headaches on its own. :-) I do love pacman and the Arch package database in most other regards, however. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1f26hg/why_does_haskell_suck_on_arch/ca6wt0c
viraptor 13y ago
Vagrant!
ginko 13y ago
It would be great if glfw2 were in community. While I like Arch's philosophy of always being on the cutting edge and making the glfw package be GLFW 3.0, I think it would be good if GLFW 2.x stayed in the official repositories for a while as a separate package. The two packages don't interfere with each other. It's basically the same situation as with SDL 2 and 3.
gillianseed 13y ago
How about 'packjpg' for AUR, it's an open source lossless JPEG compressor which gives ~20-25% compression, the resulting compressed files are either stored as single (.pjg) files or as archives (.pja) which can then be decompressed back into the original jpeg files. http://www.elektronik.htw-aalen.de/packjpg/ http://www.elektronik.htw-aalen.de/packjpg/
aw3c2 13y ago
aarddict as offline wiki reader gpa, the gnu privacy assistant qgis is free GIS gimagereader is nice OCR

zdw 13y ago

If you're a developer, try to package your own things for the distros you care about. And accept patches that fix packaging issues. Think about how much easier your ops friends, and the continuous integration systems and similar will have it if all they have to do is run an "apt get" or "port install" to get a fully built version of your code. Things that help: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package https://wiki.debian.org/IntroDebianPackaging https://wiki.debian.org/IntroDebianPackaging http://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.creating-portfile.html http://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.creating-portf... http://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/guide.html http://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/guide.html http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/creating.html http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/creating.html

massysett 13y ago
Shouldn't packaging be left to each distributor's experts? As a developer of software you're an expert in whatever your software does--web server, calculator, compiler, whatever. There is no way you can be an expert in your software's functionality and in packaging, especially for more than one distribution. I'm always wary of installing packages not provided by my distribution, just because I have more faith that my distribution's packagers know how to package and they are more likely to use QA processes that will catch packaging bugs. I'd rather compile from source than install third-party packages; I can make my own rudimentary package that would be woefully inadequate for general use but that is perfectly sufficient for my needs.
- blueblob 13y ago
  I think that depends. ArchLinux packages are almost just bash scripts. People can request fixes. I am sure when you first started programming you weren't an expert and that same logic applies to making packages. Multiple distributions you may be right. I suppose it is fair enough that you would want to install third party packages from source but with most package managers I would guess you could download the package and look at how it is built or at least what files it contains. Using packages can make cleaning up a bad package easier.

patcon 13y ago

Or ask them to join Gittip! After they're signed up, others will be able to start giving them recurring weekly gifts that are totally anonymous and categorically no-strings-attached. It's like a DFTBA grant. Disclaimer: I've taken 4 months off work to help work on the platform.

rdtsc 13y ago

This cannot be overstated, I have heard during conferences packagers being made fun of, something to the effect of "they are so cute, they don't understand our problems". To me it seem some are stuck between a rock and a hard place -- distro requirements vs application specific (vendor) requirements. So vendor likes to bundle specific library .so in the package or compiles external modules as static. Distro requirement, for security reasons for example, disallow that. Packager is left in the middle trying to reconcile the differences between the two. I have seen people stop maintaining their packages. Yeah sometimes there is nothing you can do and the latest coolest database or web browser or game just can't easily go into the main distro. But also I can't tell you how happy I have been in the past if a library I wanted to use was in the repo and I could just to an apt-get or yum install and all that is due to someone putting the work into doing that. Now instead of packaging it myself, building it, I saved a lot of time.

eplumlee 13y ago

Don't just thank them. If you cannot support with your time, send them new hardware and beer.

abruzzi 13y ago

I thank my packager by paying them ~$12k a year for "support".

xfalcox 13y ago

After being forced to use a non Debian distro at new servers at work (SLES) I am so proud of Ubuntu packaging community.

TallGuyShort 13y ago
Debian does have an impressive list of packages, but I'd rather use Zypper than Apt any day. It's the only mainstream package manager that actually lets you choose what to do when a dependency can't be satisfied or there's a version mismatch.

caycep 13y ago

could they have used a better example than MUMPS tho....yes, I know it works with its peculiar brand of duct tape, chewing gum and baling wire, but still...

jude- 13y ago

I'm lazy when it comes to these things, so I use FPM. It's great if you're dealing with RPM and .deb packages (and a few others). I saw someone else (vacri) mention it in this thread, but it definitely deserves consideration if you want to side-step setting up a packaging environment. Link: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm

ksk 13y ago

To me, its rather sad that we still have to rely on multiple third party apps for dependency management - something that a modern OS should have baked into its core branch.