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Because I have been using Archlinux full time for a while now. It's dead simple to make PKGBUILDs and maintain your own packages. Yum and RPM? forget it.

zanny 11y ago
I just made my first pkgbuild yesterday and threw it on the AUR. Having come from, first, using launchpad (eech) to using the OBS (blargh) how are pkgbuilds not "the final solution" again? They are incredibly fantastic to write and use.
- gh02t 11y ago
  PKGBUILDs and the AUR are great, but I really wish they had a spot on the AUR page for people to add extra info particular to the that package. For instance, if you come across the package in the AUR 'firefox-toast' (made up example), there is no place on the AUR page to add a description that says something like "firefox built with support for toasters." The only place to describe package customizations is in the name and that's often not enough. You could put it in the PKGBUILD, but it seems people almost never do.
  - zanny 11y ago
    The AUR page is always completely generated by the pkgbuild. You cannot edit any of the fields yourself, you just have to upload a new source archive. In the pkgbuild you are talking about the pkgdesc field, and it is not that hard to paste a quotes wrapped string on a line in there for a description...
    - gh02t 11y ago
      Quite true, I know how they're generated. More like, I wish you could include something like an optional README file or something. Particularly for packages that require further setup. I know people often use the `install` function to do it, but it seems like I often run into packages that leave me wondering either what they do or what else I have to do to make them work. This of course isn't necessarily a flaw in the AUR and is really more of an issue with the packagers doing a bad job.
      - zanny 11y ago
        You could add a README as an external source if one is not included with the binary package or source repo itself. And yeah I know that isn't basically a longform description field on the AUR page, but comments can do that job too. I don't see it as some crippling issue, and honestly I would probably not even change it - the way the AUR is laid out now makes it easy to pull down pkgbuilds and display package information agnostic to the environment easily. Adding paragraphs of detail into the pkgbuild or on the website limits that.
amyjess 11y ago
I've built debs by hand before. It's not hard, and it's trivial to automate with shell scripts. And once you've built a deb, you can use alien to convert to RPM (the only gotcha is that RPM runs preinst/postinst scripts with an empty environment and dpkg doesn't). (and I say this as a diehard Arch user who came from Gentoo)

zanny 11y ago

I just made my first pkgbuild yesterday and threw it on the AUR. Having come from, first, using launchpad (eech) to using the OBS (blargh) how are pkgbuilds not "the final solution" again? They are incredibly fantastic to write and use.

gh02t 11y ago
PKGBUILDs and the AUR are great, but I really wish they had a spot on the AUR page for people to add extra info particular to the that package. For instance, if you come across the package in the AUR 'firefox-toast' (made up example), there is no place on the AUR page to add a description that says something like "firefox built with support for toasters." The only place to describe package customizations is in the name and that's often not enough. You could put it in the PKGBUILD, but it seems people almost never do.
- zanny 11y ago
  The AUR page is always completely generated by the pkgbuild. You cannot edit any of the fields yourself, you just have to upload a new source archive. In the pkgbuild you are talking about the pkgdesc field, and it is not that hard to paste a quotes wrapped string on a line in there for a description...
  - gh02t 11y ago
    Quite true, I know how they're generated. More like, I wish you could include something like an optional README file or something. Particularly for packages that require further setup. I know people often use the `install` function to do it, but it seems like I often run into packages that leave me wondering either what they do or what else I have to do to make them work. This of course isn't necessarily a flaw in the AUR and is really more of an issue with the packagers doing a bad job.
    - zanny 11y ago
      You could add a README as an external source if one is not included with the binary package or source repo itself. And yeah I know that isn't basically a longform description field on the AUR page, but comments can do that job too. I don't see it as some crippling issue, and honestly I would probably not even change it - the way the AUR is laid out now makes it easy to pull down pkgbuilds and display package information agnostic to the environment easily. Adding paragraphs of detail into the pkgbuild or on the website limits that.

amyjess 11y ago

I've built debs by hand before. It's not hard, and it's trivial to automate with shell scripts. And once you've built a deb, you can use alien to convert to RPM (the only gotcha is that RPM runs preinst/postinst scripts with an empty environment and dpkg doesn't). (and I say this as a diehard Arch user who came from Gentoo)