AUR maintainer for a few niche packages here. It’s because it lowers the barrier of entry. Remember this is all a volunteer effort.
What do I do when someone running ubuntu reports an error saying the PKGBUILD doesn’t work?
What if the program fails due to a different version of the kernel? (True story, only after 2 weeks of debugging I found out that the user was running Manjaro, which used a different naming convention for the kernel)
What do I do if someone reports a missing library dependency on fedora? Should I also package that library for fedora?
If I’m packaging drivers for specific hardware. I’m not going to install a specific distro just to fix your issue (sorry!). Most of my advice is given on a best effort basis. I made these build scripts for myself since I want native installs for all my software, and thought other people may be interested in them as well. If the responsibility of maintaining them becomes too overwhelming (like with your LUR case). I’ll probably host these build scripts in a private repo instead.
Fair enough. Would still be cool if we had a single pkgbuild client that could pull from repositories that host packages that are compatible for a given distro. Keep the AUR for Arch users, but have Fedora, Ubuntu etc. repos for users on those distros and their particular setups/dependencies etc. It’s more the technology of AUR that I think would be good for all of linux rather than the AUR’s contents itself.
That, or I’ll just wait for Vanilla/APX to get less janky.
AUR maintainer for a few niche packages here. It’s because it lowers the barrier of entry. Remember this is all a volunteer effort.
What do I do when someone running ubuntu reports an error saying the PKGBUILD doesn’t work?
What if the program fails due to a different version of the kernel? (True story, only after 2 weeks of debugging I found out that the user was running Manjaro, which used a different naming convention for the kernel)
What do I do if someone reports a missing library dependency on fedora? Should I also package that library for fedora?
If I’m packaging drivers for specific hardware. I’m not going to install a specific distro just to fix your issue (sorry!). Most of my advice is given on a best effort basis. I made these build scripts for myself since I want native installs for all my software, and thought other people may be interested in them as well. If the responsibility of maintaining them becomes too overwhelming (like with your LUR case). I’ll probably host these build scripts in a private repo instead.
Fair enough. Would still be cool if we had a single pkgbuild client that could pull from repositories that host packages that are compatible for a given distro. Keep the AUR for Arch users, but have Fedora, Ubuntu etc. repos for users on those distros and their particular setups/dependencies etc. It’s more the technology of AUR that I think would be good for all of linux rather than the AUR’s contents itself.
That, or I’ll just wait for Vanilla/APX to get less janky.
You’re thinking of the OBS (open build service), which does exist.