My Problem With Arch Linux Packaging

[@vaxryy]

Hm, maybe I should distribute Hyprland solely as an Official™ Snap™ Just kidding. But yeah, arch's update took a while and it was annoying to me too, I'd get a LOT of bug reports for 0.30.0 and I'd have to tell people to update because the bug has been long fixed.

[@BrodieRobertson]

Originally this was going be a video asking Arch to drop the package

[@GSBarlev]

FYI, the Nix package has been working great for me on the Steam Deck. Thanks for providing that option-controller layout + Steam Input = a glorious Hyprland experience

[@aziz9488]

maybe don't create bugs in the first place ?

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@aziz9488 just don't write code

[@aziz9488]

@@BrodieRobertson yes happier life

[@Linuxdirk]

This unfortunately is not Hyprland-specific. The Arch packages repository currently has 971 packages flagged out of date. Some of them last updated 2+ years ago!

[@pabloqp7929]

Not all packages can be maintained. If they aren't actually broken, should they be removed if no one steps up to patch?

[@BrodieRobertson]

Hyprland was just a recent example of a common problem, I'm just trying to spitball ideas about a solution but I'm honestly not sure where if anywhere would be realistically viable

[@Linuxdirk]

@@BrodieRobertson I’d go a rather radical way: If a package is outdated for 2 months or more without feedback from the maintainer, move it to the AUR. If the package was not taken over by someone else in the meantime, the original maintainer can take ownership and request moving it back to the repositories. This keeps current users “save” as packages moved to the AUR simply do not update anymore, so no “malicious takeover” of already installed software can happen automatically. It also makes clear for new users that the package is not considered as “provided by Arch” anymore. In my opinion 2 months is long enough for a maintainer to drop a quick note even if they’re involved in something unrelated to their maintenance activities. I don’t know how it is for the repos, but maintainers of AUR packages get one single notification if a package was flagged out-of-date. This should be changed so maintainers get a mail every week for a months, and then get daily mails.

[@junebryant-ki1ir]

​@@pabloqp7929there should be a warning saying it has not been updated in x days

[@GrantZaitchick]

I don't want to make light of the fact that the people on the Arch team are for the most part maintaining Arch and its packages because they care about the rolling release as a whole. However, having a paid team with salaries would ensure that it becomes something of a responsibility rather than a suggestion to keep things maintained. I'm not sure how to solve any of this though, as you don't want the red tape, slow downs, and forced priorities that come with a corporate structure. I feel like the best thing for us to do is ensure that we back the developers, such as how Glorious Eggroll has a Patreon for his proton release, and aside from that, back the non profit such as "Software in the Public Interest, Inc." which is the non-profit that handles private donations for Arch Linux. Don't get me wrong, I realize that not everyone has money to put towards a "free to use" system, but I hope that might entice the younger enthusiasts to find ways to invest their time to benefit their favorite projects (if they can).@@BrodieRobertson

[@MiukuMac]

Luckily we have 5000 distributions and 10 different packaging methods. What we really need is even more.

[@stage6fan475]

😂😂😂😂😂Linux summarized!

[@TheKevinGDX]

XDDDD

[@Tynach]

Nah, nah.. You're not thinking like a True Visionary Leader™®. What we need is a new package manager that has integrated AI capabilities. It analyzes the package formats, analyzes the state of your filesystem and the existing software installed on the system, and makes 'informed' decisions about where to put the files in the package, and what to do about merging conflicting configuration files, etc. In short, every single thing about the state of all software on your system should be shipped off to GPT-4 for analysis, obviously! It's just the most obvious way to solve All Problems Forever! Alternatively, make it so that basic package management requires two 4090s, but since -that won't make as much money- -we won't be able to sell the data to advertisers- that's too expensive for poor Linux users who can't even afford Windows licenses, we'll highly discourage it and make it so that it only works with custom kernel packages that users would have to build themselves, without any documentation for how to do that.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

No, it needs people like you to put in time and effort doing research to work out what distro is best for you. Nobody's going to deliver you your perfect Linux "on a silver platter" to you, you have to put in some hard work. The alternative is just to let Microsoft or Apple run your computer for you. Choice is never a bad thing - unless you're too damn bone idle and lazy to put in effort to make that choice.

[@sprinklednights]

That's so sad to be honest like imagine all package maintainers from different Linux distributions would come together to create only one package manager. I feel like the whole outdated packaging problem would be less of a problem if it had been like that

[@bjbboy71697]

i like the way Gentoo does it. You can add "overlay" repos from external sources (guru being the officially sanctioned aur equivalent essentially), but they are masked by default. So, a overlay package will not override an official one unless you specifically unmask the package. Keeps everything clean, but you can explicitly do whatever the heck you want if that's what you want.

[@fcolecumberri]

Not all overlays mask everything by default (I don't remember whichones don't, but I remember seing them). However I also think that the way Gentoo manage packages is the best.

[@GSBarlev]

I have no problem with how Arch does this-if one package exists in multiple repos, it just prompts you to ask which one you want installed.

[@brianhsu8333]

I’ve using Gentoo for many years, and heavily use portage overlay. I believe the default actually works like the following: if you don’t mask the portage overly manually, it will pick the latest unmasked (for example, no missing KEYWORD) version of the package you want to emerge, no matter in what portage overlay or in the office portage. If you don’t want these, you could mask the whole portage overlay and only unmask the specific package of that overlay. This is what I do now. And indeed, it's very convenient. I don't remember how many times I want to try a latest version of a program not updated yet in the official portage. What I do is simply copy the old version .ebuild file into my own overlay, and change the filename to the newer version, 'ebuild digest` it to see if I could fetch the source code tarball. And Volia, I have the latest version of that package. As long as the dependency of that package have no big change, most time it just works.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Agreed - and it's one of the main reasons I've stuck with Gentoo for 20 years now at the expense of just about every other Linux distro.

[@laughingvampire7555]

Gentoo packaging is a mess.

[@leopard3131]

This sort of thing happens in every distro when there are insufficient package maintainers official or user repo. Arch is not as bad as the ppa or copr. Generally I go to upstream in these cases but for large or complex projects it is not always so easy either. Moving repos is painful now you have to add and maintain a whole new repo and migrating packages between reps is a pain for the reasons you stated. I suggest you become an arch maintainer.

[@dashcharger24]

It's not that easy to become an Arch package maintainer. Years ago, I submitted a request to help maintain packages, as I did have a few popular ones in AUR, but they basically said no. They also don't offer any build system, at least back at the time. Meaning you would basically build the package yourself for general, and push your changes to the repo. Compared to other distros actually having a build environment, multi version control, etc. Arch is a bit of a mess.

[@leopard3131]

@francoism6945 I understand but again it is not so easy with any distro. I have packaged for several distros and unless you are favored bu the current maintainers it is difficult to have packages or patches accepted. In fact it is easier to start your own thus all the duplicates in ppa copr etc.

[@BrodieRobertson]

Yeah I'm certainly not blaming the maintainers for this problem, there has to be a better way to leverage the community support behind things like the AUR

[@SeresHotes25]

The core problem is that we have so many package managers, so many packages, so many repos, but so little maintainers

[@absalomdraconis]

At this point, I'd say a "meta package specification" that formats info about packaging options is needed, just so that packagers can use it to automate their work without project maintainers needing to support package style _blah._ Probably impossible to do a good job though.

[@spicynoodle7419]

No, we don't have too many package managers or repos or distros. Why did you buy a car when someone else has already bought one and drives it everywhere? Why do we have to go to school for years and don't get spawned with all the knowledge and personality? Why are there so many countries, races, languages and currencies?

[@SeresHotes25]

@@spicynoodle7419 I see what you mean, even though your comparison are a little hard to follow. You're saying that we want to have a lot of variety and choices in our packages and distros. And I fully agree with you! And I didn't give a solution "We need 1 distro, and only 1 program per task!" as some kind of dictator. If you want my opinion, it'd be cool if we had some kind of standardization in package managers. I'm not a maintainer, so I don't know problems and best solutions here. But maybe a universal package manager? Or a universal package format? We could have a server that stores every package of every version of every program with some kind of dependency resolving program. In that case distro maintainers just pick the default programs and configs for their distros and do almost no work in my ideal dreams.

[@Spencer-wc6ew]

I always saw the core idea to FOSS was that just anyone can be like "I'll fix this myself". But that AUR rule basically forbids that from happening in these cases.

[@BrodieRobertson]

You can make a 3rd party repo but you cannot use the Arch infrastructure outside of submitting an MR

[@GaryGreene1977]

As someone that has in the past worked on the RPM5 project, I'd recommend moving this to a metadata flag set. All package information is stored server side, so when the metadata is regenerated server side, it could include an "upstream version" tag in the data set. Yes, this does require changes to pacman, and would require some mechanism put in place to probe for new releases from upstream (using a feed from freecode, mayby???), but I think this is more doable, and far less disruptive than moving things between repos

[@darkmtbg]

The biggest flaw i had with arch was FFMPG not being updated on the official packages, to the lastest version while the AUR version of a package was expecting the newest version was there.that opened up the door for flatpak on my system to get that packages to ensure stability for that program.

[@az9az9az9]

There is nothing wrong with Flatpack and Snaps or zipped portable apps. Often they are compiled with more supported formats.

[@LeonWhite]

I have been packaging for Alpine lately and it is really easy to get new packages added to `testing`. But the fact is that actually maintaining the packages and keeping them building as new versions come out is incredibly hard, time consuming work (particularly with musl libc). There needs to be better funding for professional maintainers.

[@satnififu]

This is why I eventually ditched Arch for Tumbleweed. Corporate distros may not be at their popularity peak as of late, but having people whose JOB is to maintain your distro's packages definitely does something for update consistency

[@owlmostdead9492]

Gecko gang

[@drishalballaney]

I also really wanted to go tumbleweed at some point but the mirrors are slow and it does not support parallel downloads :(

[@Time4Technology]

@@drishalballaneyHi, since some time updates are available on a CDN. Would be great if you'd give it another go!

[@massimilianotubani1471]

@@drishalballaney I've been using Tumbleweed in the past and now I'm on Arch: I wouldn't switch back

[@vprwave]

There is an extra-testing repo. The problem always was, there was not enough test feedback, so most responsibility remains with the maintainers, and that takes too much time. One general problem is that you can't use extra-testing for the one/two packages you are keen (and experienced) on, but the whole bunch. Hence, the way to use a corresponding -git package for those two is the right approach imo. It's you as the user who has to commit to it. And git-tags are widely used by the maintainers. They choose what approach fits them best per package. Whatever they choose to keep the package rolling close to stable releases is right.

[@TheB3n0]

I love how you described DWL. I tried it and came to realization that I don't hate myself enough to use it

[@Beryesa.]

Wayfire was adopted by raspberry pi and I think it'll grow as a floating/stacking compositor (how many have we got there, labwc, this... and?) I think we should make more stacking compositors :P

[@vaxryy]

hyprland with windowrulev2 = float, class:.* best stacking compositor ever

[@Beryesa.]

​@@vaxryyCan I PR a --my-next-window-wont-tile launch argument kekw

[@russjr08]

This is one of the reasons I've gotten used to install the mainline arch repo packages via the AUR helper that I use, yay. It'll show if a package is flagged as out of date, along when the package was flagged.

[@5ebastiancarlo5]

By the way, the Arch package for bash (!) was in 5.1 for almost a year after 5.2 was released.

[@fish3977]

Cutting edge!

[@BrodieRobertson]

I don't believe Arch has ever described itself as such that's been a community description

[@simian3455]

💡A package manager that leverages "tags" and automatic tagging to simplify package maintenance and discovery. tags are extremely flexible and easy to change and could really help with his problem, this concept is not radical it's well tested and has actually helped extremely large projects. git uses a tags so why cant the package manager.

[@Lampe2020]

The only program I don't use from any [deb] repo is firefox (because I want to use Developer Edition and because I literally _cannot_ play videos for more than three seconds on the Canonical-compiled one).

[@craigw4644]

Switched from KWin X11 to Wayland and Hyprland 3-weeks ago: Loving it.

[@Beryesa.]

This makes me think of the new-ish flatpak warning for out of date apps. Maybe a big number of alerts pinging other maintainers would be a demand mechanism and someone can claim it temporarily (like the how translations work) and reviewing MRs for popular packages would be much faster?

[@orbatos]

This is an illustration of how repo maintenance starts with the developer regardless of which repo it is. If you want to use Flatpak, deb, etc. or whatever primarily fine but generally packaging for all syarems can been done with only a little homework, then automated. This is important because it allows repo maintainers to manage the rest of the logistics without also having to worry about whether a dev has stopped updating.

[@LunarLambda]

I like that hyprland has no way to easily set the default wallpaper but also ships an obnoxious anime girl wallpaper by default that you can't turn off either

[@cheetahstrike2137]

You can turn that off (force_default_wallpaper = 0)

[@umop3plsdn]

you can turn her off you just got to read the wiki lol it was literally for this purpose alone since no one seems to read the documents

[@tomverlaine728]

I went to swayfx after I saw that. Target demo seems to be discord spergs. I had a good i3 config anyway. The animations are nice tho!

[@H3cJP]

btw the current version is up to date, 0.33.1 was released 3 days ago and its already on the arch extra repo, so it seems that its anymore a problem, lets see if they keep rythm

[@ChrispyNut]

The name that comes to mind would be confusing because of OpenSuse, but "Slowroll" repo I think would work. Informing that the package is being maintained, just ... of low importance (perhaps temporarily) or only updated every few releases for increased stability.

[@zeckma]

I dunno how to go about applying to be on the Arch team. I don't even use it anymore. But, I guess another good way to take care of this problem is by getting a person or multiple people on the team whose sole job is to look after FOOD (flagged out-of-date) packages to bring them back up to date. I think it'd be fun for me to do as a sort of part-time thing as I do like manually compiling things. I also wanna fix the OBS Chromium issue myself. Again, not sure how I would go about applying, if I could, and honestly I dunno if I even wanna do it.

[@sharperguy]

in nixos at least if a package is out of date you would just add an override in your config to point to the new version. Of course your have to the build from source but it should work without needing to install and build dependencies

[@bluephreakr]

A new repo would be the best thing for orphaned packages, honestly. If something there isn't being removed but it's out of date, then some backend adjustment could be made where the repositories are all given a list of packages _to be archived_ which could then expand into general operations for mirror maintainers, so when the mirrors are updated, the new repo is made, select packages are put into it, and sybchronised mirror updating can occur as-needed in future. A synchronised mirror update would mean that mirrors would be given a window of time to stage a request for update, so that all mirrors receive commands to perform, then after a deadline to accept, have the capability for late mirrors to receive these changes, but all mirrors within the time window to sync at-once will have automated backend tasks occur in unison.

[@qlum]

What's still a posibility, though not a commonly used one is maintaining a unofficial user repo, where the package could be updated faster. As far as I know nothing prevents that. it's just inconvenient to do.

[@BrodieRobertson]

The AUR is really distant from the core repos, and cannot be directly interacted with by Pacman maybe something like that with looser submission requirements would be a good idea

[@pagwin5308]

@@BrodieRobertson I don't think that's what they mean, I think they're talking about what's described under "REPOSITORY SECTIONS" in the pacman .conf man page (put a space before the period so youtube doesn't make it a hyperlink), namely using that to specify a package repository location that isn't officially a part of arch linux I'd link to it directly but I've heard that youtube doesn't like links due to spam/scam filtering

[@qlum]

@@BrodieRobertson That's why you have the option to add your own repo's to the pacman config, this has been done for a couple of things, most noticable zfs-linux.

[@evoltaocao5078]

@@qlum zfs is always out of date. f that lol btrfs ftw

[@Aeternus-j2k]

The maintainer had his opinions on calling the building system a mess, and why it's less of a mess now but still a mess, which I'm not an expert to comment on either way. At least read the whole merge request thread before saying the maintainer didn't read the Hyprland wiki and instructions.

[@istasi5201]

any update videos on wayfire?, i noticed raspbian 5 ships with it

[@BrodieRobertson]

Oh I wasn't aware of that

[@sergeykish]

I am fine with few months lag. I can always fetch PKGBUILD and update version. I can't agree with automatic switching to AUR, security expectations are different.

[@SafetySheepRnD]

Sounds like what Arch needs are paid full time maintainers or more volunteers. If you look at AUR, there are a bunch of orphaned packages as well, so it's not like there's an excess of untapped man-hours sitting around not updating these packages.

[@cebolinharenato]

The problem of volunteers is that motivation to mantain old projects goes away and the mantainer abandon the project. As they don't get money to continue there is no more reasons to work for free.

[@SafetySheepRnD]

@@cebolinharenato A lot of projects find new maintainers because someone who is using the package notices it has become orphaned and adopts it. Be the change you want to see in the world.

[@Manja500]

This is why NixOS is the new Arch Linux in my opinion. Creating packages are standardized under the Nix scripting language, and completely messy build scripts are less of a problem. Not to mention that every program is built in a sandbox so updates to libraries don't break other packages that also rely on those libraries. The only down side of NixOS is the learning curve. If your not a programmer or your not willing to learn a bit of programming your out of luck. And honestly, coming from Arch and moving to NixOS, when ever anyone talks about how "hard" Arch is and thinks that using it means they are smart, I laugh. Arch is babies first Linux distro compared to NixOS. And to be clear, that is a BAD THING that NixOS needs to work on. Being hard to use shouldn't be a positive because sudo intellectuals want to feel smart.

[@jdecicco91]

Not sure if sudo intellectuals was a pun or mistake. But I’m enjoying it anyway

[@Manja500]

@@jdecicco91 Pun, lol. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[@Hyperboid]

For anyone who doesn't get the sudo joke, just rot13 this text: fhqb fbhaqf xvaqn yvxr cfrhqb, qbrfa'g vg?

[@folksurvival]

*you're

[@drishalballaney]

my other issue with nixos is that modifying the package yourself can be a big pita, sometimes the method to do so would be absolutely different per package and also there have been issues with broken packages on updates specially on nixos unstable

[@cfillion]

Arch is still shipping Ruby 3.0 (2 years out of date!) while upstream is now at 3.2 and soon 3.3, LLVM 17 has been out since September yet the repo is still stuck on 16...

[@paulgupta2454]

Archive is a horrible word for it. Stale is better. Archive means that it's not going to get more updates. At least in terms of GitHub, which is a big definer for software lingo

[@itjustcrashed]

Brodie should rebrand into “The Rant Man with a beard.”

[@BrodieRobertson]

Bit too long but "The Rant Man" has a nice ring to it

[@itjustcrashed]

@@BrodieRobertson My brother would see me watching you over my shoulder and call you “Beard Guy.”

[@nosotrosloslobosestamosreg4115]

*laughs in Debian*

[@Timbalo0]

😆

[@MaartenT]

I like Debian as well and use it for servers, but I just got this email today: Due to an issue in the ext4 file system with data corruption in kernel 6.1.64-1, we are pausing the planned Debian 12.3 point release images for today while we attend to fixes. Please do not upgrade any systems at this time, we urge caution for users with UnattendeUpgrades configured. For more information please refer to Debian bug report #1057843 If you update now (until they fix it), it tries to push that bad kernel onto the system, so I wouldn't call it perfect either. That kernel has been updated on arch for a while now as well (I don't use the LTS kernel on arch though).

[@gtsiam]

I would agree with you up until a week or so ago, at which point merge requests where still closed - but since that is no longer the case, I'd rather wait and see how the packaging situation evolves.

[@zeocamo]

i would love for Arch to fix this Brodie is talking about. something like pinta that is flag out of date, it just need to change 1 line so it can build on the new version of dotnet, it will work but because it say 7.0 and not 8.0 then we can't update to dontnet 8 it is a so simple change but no one is there to make it? error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) :: installing dotnet-runtime (8.0.0.sdk100-3) breaks dependency 'dotnet-runtime-7.0' required by pinta -> error installing repo packages

[@starnumber_alt]

Also pacman should notify of the out-of-date tag

[@Sette_megaera]

speaking of out of date aur package the 32 bit version of gtstreamer outdated and broken in arch which is needed for a fully working native wine gaming or even a video playback for specific video or sound format or atleast was the situation few months ago but since i switched to ubuntu im not sure if most things are still broken

[@callmesteve7874]

Well, the problem can be solved as follows: if the maintainer is not working on the package for some reason, they can make a button in the AUR (in addition to the "flag package") with text like "I want to become the maintainer of this package!". When you click the button, an email notification goes to the existing maintainer with the following content: "Dear maintainer! Your package has been marked as not being updated for a long time. We ask you to respond to this message and update the package, or mark the start of work with an update of the package to increase the deadline, so we know that you're on it." If the maintainer does not take any action for, say, a week or two, then the maintainer of this package becomes the person who pressed the button. Something like that. And it is not technically hard to program.

[@terminalvelocity4858]

Brodie, my eyes! Dark Reader for your browser? 😉

[@Timbalo0]

Not sure how a video about a single specific package not being updated for a while (yeah, i was waiting patiently for an update too) does any good, especially *after* it has been updated a couple of times since (only a few hours after the git release too). I kinda feel bad for the package maintainer right now, being called out for what is basically a click-bait.

[@BrodieRobertson]

It's a recent example of a common problem

[@MegaManNeo]

You should see the OBS' when it comes to double entries and outdated packages. It's just as bad as the AUR can be, according to your story.

[@BrodieRobertson]

Never use the unofficial OBS just use the flatpak to get the full feature set

[@MegaManNeo]

@@BrodieRobertson oh, I mean SUSE's open build service.

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@MegaManNeo by bad, the context clues were a bit hazy

[@MegaManNeo]

@@BrodieRobertson fair but having the same shortcut for multiple projects too is terrible to begin with 🤣

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@MegaManNeo they've both been around for a while, I'm not actually sure what was first

[@1qwerasdzxcvfrtgb]

Hyprland is great! Until I have to start looking through the wiki...

[@conjurermast]

Compared to Awesome`s docs It`s paradise. (and discord has a ton of searchable solved problems)

[@Timbalo0]

The wiki is great, no idea what you're talking about...

[@BrodieRobertson]

Grab the Arco config

[@linhusp2349]

Ppl can praise the hyprland wiki all they want but to my eyes its no different than the KDE setting. Such a mess

[@Daktyl198]

I love that Hyperland exists, but as somebody who basically requires a floating window manager, I'm basically SoL for Wayland-first WM/DE options until COSMIC comes out unfortunately. Or maybe Plasma 6, but honestly Gnome and Plasma are both just too heavy for me these days. And yes, I've tried Wayfire... it sucks.

[@RedBlueProductions1]

some packages are marked out of date even though they receive updates! i forget which one it was though

[@BrodieRobertson]

Some people are just stupid and mark it when it's not out of date

[@Spartan322]

I remember dealing with this for Godot which was 2 weeks out of date for one of the 4.1 patch releases. When you have teams relying on you for a version update, waiting for the arch repo packages to help you can be a nightmare when you need a bug fixed asap, and since Godot 4 became the mainstream version it got nuked off the AUR despite the AUR repo only ever being a day or two out of date. I said screw it and decided to just duplicate the old AUR package, changed the version, and retrieved it from the github release directly assets, few days after the Godot package got updated, but now I have a local package that I use to force the Godot package to be updated even if the arch repo stays out of date. Installing Godot is trivial since its just a single portable executable file you can download and its only 100 megs, but I wanted my package manager, desktop shortcuts, and path to have the correct version without hassle since I make use of them regularly. Was easier that way.

[@billeterk]

I don’t know the program but now I’m curious if it was named just for “Waiting for Godot” jokes!

[@Spartan322]

@@billeterk In part, yes.

[@joekd1]

I just can't wait for Hyprland to get more "stable" so I can use it on Debian.

[@CrazyLuke11]

Hey. Love your content. I have one question: what wm do you use?

[@BrodieRobertson]

Currently Awesomewm sometimes Hyprland

[@starsetknight]

I run the -git version of hyprland, but I'm aware that I live on edge, but good to know I'm not affected by this (at least with hyprland) lol

[@Daktyl198]

To be fair to him, a large shift in build setup on a single package out of the probably hundreds or even thousand he is in charge of is definitely "upstream's mess", and it shouldn't be necessary for him to go out of his way to read a wiki about the change. I'm sure he would have gotten there eventually, but that's hardly his fault.

[@greatgamegal]

Using the git version myself and I've yet to have it break due to that, but I also have a couple other options installed if it does break that I feel comfortable just launching from like tty2.

[@BrodieRobertson]

You can absolutely get lucky with the git version but it's not uncommon for a regression to slip in. It just may not be a regression you care about

[@5ebastiancarlo5]

sway for pros, hyprland for bros

[@Funny0facer]

Instead of moving it to a different repo, I think the following would be sufficient for your use case: Pacman could throw a message/warning when it catches that a package on your system is flagged out-of-date for more than X-time. This message should not be thrown again for Y-time to not bother the user every time, they update the system.

[@BrodieRobertson]

By itself that puts the user in a position where they have a problem but no realistic way to deal with it.

[@niksingh710]

which mouse scroll extension you have?

[@BrodieRobertson]

Autoscroll

[@niksingh710]

sad that it is not available on firefox.@@BrodieRobertson

[@BrodieRobertson]

You don't need one, there's a setting for it on Firefox

[@niksingh710]

@@BrodieRobertson wow I wasn't even aware of that thanks buddy....

[@notimportant7682]

The more i think about it the less I think its possible to come up with a smooth solution that doesnt errode the layers of trust that a distro is built on. You either expand your vetting process and communication network between maintainers to create room for horizontal growth, you allow less vetted comunity members to fill the gaps but with a fair warning and let the user opt in, or you let things remain human and occasionally slow.

[@spinkey4842]

i see someone walked outside to get the mail...... that sunburn got yo ass

[@BrodieRobertson]

That's from the beach

[@mskiptr]

Maybe having pacman warn us on updates that packages are out of date would be enough. + a process to start maintaining such packages in the AUR ofc. A whole extra repo seems like an overkill, and it would make git history an even greater mess. Tho moving packages to AUR wouldn't be much better in this regard, so I guess our best option would be to instead have other maintainers review and accept patches from the general public. Also, if warning users about every out-of-date package is too much noise, maybe some 'abandoned' flag could be created instead. Or pacman could just warn when a packages is out-of-date for more than a month or something.

[@ratatouillegamer7132]

Hyprland is very faster, i think Hyprland renderer is the fastest renderer, if you compare with other Compositors: Kwin, Mutter this all is not much more faster including in Blur and Effects, for some reason, this is really faster, i think Mutter will be fast in the same capabilities after GLES 3.0 + Triple Buffering + Direct Scanout using Hardware planes + DRM Deadline, i think this can achieve more performance than Hyprland

[@darsparx]

I'd love to see where if this happens theres a way if the community is out of date then use the official and vice versa. That would be ideal imo 😅

[@atemoc]

Currently on NixOS, running Hyprland on my main PC with NVIDIA graphics, under the stable channel. Re-tried arch a few weeks ago with the same set-up, and man, I love Arch, but I just got too comfy with NixOS, and it is more stable in my experience. Though, NixOS is not for everyone.

[@PhilKulak]

And Hyprland is only a couple weeks out of date in Nix packages, currently. I get the feeling a lot of Hyprland users use Nix; it comes up a lot.

[@notuxnobux]

Speaking of NixOS. Somebody packaged my software there and never updated it. It wasn't updated for 2 years despite the newest version having tons of bug fixes and many more features. NixOS has a bigger problem than arch when it comes to abandoned packages.

[@billeterk]

Nothing’s for everyone. Without putting much work in NixOS is mostly super comfortable.. and occasionally really, really annoying :-)

[@atemoc]

@@notuxnobux What is the package in question? Is it an official package, or just a flake?

[@atemoc]

@@billeterk Everything's smooth until the documentation lacks. Arch and Gentoo's documentations are generally of better quality, or at least, fuller of useful information, a lot of which being distro-independent as well.

[@pip5528]

I've paid for Premium since 2016 which gives you way more than just ad blocking and I think the war on ad blockers is hilarious. They keep shooting themselves in the foot.

[@hiru92]

watching it on hyprland 😁

[@prism223]

This is a problem with the package system like cold fries are a problem with deep fryers.

[@bims_sh]

I run so many -git packages on my system that I lost count. Never broke luckily.

[@BrodieRobertson]

It's not like they suddenly break but on the off chance you update on a bad commit you'll have some fun

[@geooot]

Im surprised upgrading the package is such a manual process. Why cant they automate the packaging process? Also, it should probably be easier for people to contribute the new release where the maintainer could be the final judge on whether to merge it.

[@BrodieRobertson]

In this instance the build process was changed by upstream

[@FengLengshun]

Yeah, in comparison many of the other distro are maintained by corporate employees (even Debian). Main arch repo is weird in that it's pretty small compared to the other big distro but it's also the least maintained (I've heard gnome packages having similar issues as well). It isn't a complete disaster, but issues happens, and it's part of the reason I'd rather enjoy Arch through Distrobox and Conty

[@julkip]

I would say this is an inherent problem of community run rolling release distros…

[@ThePotatoChronicler]

Wait... I think I tried out Hyprland for the first time during that time, and I have Nvidia GPU 🤔

[@Mr.Finkel]

all these wayland compositors are getting developed at a breakneck pace, i wouldnt expect a package maintainer to keep up realistically. Doesnt the package maintainer have some leeway to decide if new version of software have enough bug fixes/new features for it to be worth updating the package or not?

[@SkylerLinux]

Arch Forum jerks love to say "Now that you know how to do it yourself don't use AUR Helpers" Yet I'm like yeah but YAY tells when when packages are flagged out of date

[@NHOrus]

Can you share your hyprland config? Once, upon a time, my wm was DWM, and hyprland feels closest to that.

[@yogurtColombiano]

You could try dwl, it is the closest dwm implementation for wayland. IIRC i think it is based on wlroots

[@wifibills]

​@@yogurtColombiano it is based on wlroots

[@yahhasz]

Only reason I don't use hyprland anymore (sway now) is because many applications that run xwayland (jetbrains IDE), are bugged. For example in case of Pycharm, the suggestion menu? (suggests the code you're writing) looks like it's been scaled incorrectly and is squashed down so you don't understand anything. Otherwise, great

[@Skelterbane69]

Couldn't you make a windowrule that scales it properly? Or am I misunderstanding the problem?

[@yahhasz]

@@Skelterbane69 many github issues create and no one sad they fixed it, doubt it

[@estevaomendes2305]

Well, I do hate myself enough to the point of debugging patch and wlroots version conflicts on dwl, lol. But, besides these casualties, it's still a pretty good compositor.

[@bes12000]

I use Garuda Linux which is a branch of Arch and updates roll in nearly daily, even discord updates get rolled out the same day as release..

[@emperorarasaka]

"You're free (libre) to choose whatever packaging you want but lets "incentivize" people towards Flathub where possible and that should solve it. (Anyone who chooses another packaging type or standard will be shot. Remember, you are free to choose but not free from consequences.)" - Brodie "Stallman" Robertson

[@SnowyRVulpix]

Isn’t this a problem with most distro-based repos?

[@niksingh710]

want hyprland back from arch repos to aur 😆

[@laughingvampire7555]

Nix rocks, is just the best package manager in all of Linux.

[@hendrykhoza4782]

bro... I don't hate myself

[@tireseas]

Archive repo eh? It'd happen with nearly every Gnome release.

[@Budjarn]

Time to just give up and use flatpak

[@aris1004]

Not archive repo. The limbo repo. 😁

[@nombreapellido9038]

Is it me or does this guy sound like an Australian Gilbert Godfrey? He has good content and I am an ardent Archer (until I move on to another distro).

[@BrodieRobertson]

Thanks for the compliment

[@Blueeeeeee]

Is this some kind of very clever clickbait ?

[@tomverlaine728]

It's a youtube video

[@knightrider585]

Haha dwl is the best so I think you got that wrong.

[@BrodieRobertson]

Well it might be great but it's not a great use of your time

[@knightrider585]

@@BrodieRobertson I agree I wouldn't recommend dwl to other people. I like having a window manager/compositor that just does what I want it to though.

[@mohamad20zx34]

Hey if hate arch then don't use it it simply as that use OpenSuse or even debain

[@Tritium21]

[Laughs in CentOS]

[@littlemac5942]

Aur plz fix fluffychat

[@ACuteAura]

given the level of maturity of the hyprland developers (plus bonus the transphobia), maybe you should be 2-3 weeks behind upstream. just in case.

[@snickersanyone]

Not that you’re wrong, but have you ever seen how many people blindly flag pkgs as out-of-date.. (edit: removed “completly” since that implied that you were wrong in at least some parts, which is not what i meant)

[@BrodieRobertson]

That's why I think there should be some time delay, if you don't notice a package you maintain was flagged out of date for a month let's say, that seems like an issue

[@snickersanyone]

@@BrodieRobertson Oh yeah, sorry I missed that. I think the only other solution would be some kind of branching. Everything stays as it is now, but anyone can submit their own version of a package: yay pkg still only shows one pkg, but yay pkg:id allows you to explicitly choose a version maintained by someone else. If the main pkg gets flagged as out of date, and isn’t updated within 4 to 6 weeks, then the most popular alternative gets bumped up to “official” status. Might be a good compromise between suse’s OBS mess and AUR’s current situation, but it would put some additional strain on the servers.

[@edwardecl]

how about name the AUR packages {program_name}-aur and don't put the silly rules in preventing people from duplicating.

[@Berkshire-Hathaway]

Why not decentralise the repositories? Hyprland could have its own repo with up-to-date packages if the arch repo was too outdated.

[@Rialagma]

"You don't want to be running a 3 month old version" jesus fucking christ what is wrong with Arch users

[@talkysassis]

Any package that's not static and upstream is a bad package. You have no way to prove that this is what the dev made.

[@ayaya-ayaya]

At the same time, how can you know what the dev gives you is what you believed you would get? Pointless argument.

[@talkysassis]

@@ayaya-ayayaIf the dev is a corrupt dev, then we can change the dev. And people will say that. We can see this with uTorrent. The problem is that no one will ever review something by the eyes of the repo package, so you can't know.

[@talkysassis]

Anyway, I'm not talking about security. Regular users don't care about that. They use Google things. The problem is: The repo program can't be a 100% hit. Look at the problem with Bottles. Lots of problems from not being able to install various versions of libs.

[@talkysassis]

@@__Watcher___ It's not about the code. It's about the lib versions, the static resources, the build system. A program is made to work in a very specific way. You can't change libs and expect things to be 100% working all the time. That's why I like the steam package. A single binary with the update manager that makes a static program inside a folder that can't be broken by the system. Just the way Linus predicted.

[@talkysassis]

@@__Watcher___ Then why bet instead of providing a way to get from the devs?

[@eagerestwolf]

Poor Niri gets no love in the Wayland compositor/build your own DE community.

[@alphaomega154]

though the "arch" name would absolutely more "aligned" to my self . . . . . i found everything "arch linux" related very problematic on other linux distros. you know how flatpak is a "arch linux" thing, right? so recently i just updated the iGPU driver in my device which using non arch linux distro, and the opensource front-end of of one of my fav game, "corsixth" that installed through FLATPAK stop launching. apparently, flatpak's own freedesktop gl can not sync with the system's libgl or something. this kind of headaches. i dream the day where billions of COMMON people/peasants will start using linux, i just cant see that happening at this point. XD!!

[@AniAdamPashut]

Just make pacman work like bitcoin or something. Every one can commit but have to prove thats its the package. Nah its prob a bad idea