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Comment by Aardwolf

8 years ago

Unfortunately lots of things one actually wants are on AUR, things like jpeginfo, golly, steam-fonts, simple-mtpfs, jslint, ...

A case for putting more things in the main Archlinux repositories!

17 comments

Aardwolf

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xiii1408  8 years ago

My understanding is some things (e.g. Google Chrome, Google and Microsoft fonts) can't be put in the main Arch Linux repos for copyright reasons.

  • bscphil  8 years ago

    Chromium and Google's Roboto and Noto fonts are all in the official repos.

    • xiii1408  8 years ago

      Yeah, Chromium, which is FOSS, not Google Chrome, and Google Noto Fonts, which are also FOSS.

      Anything proprietary can't simply be copied over and mirrored for copyright reasons.

  • arendtio  8 years ago

    I wonder how other distributions solve that situation.

    • Hello71  8 years ago

      Either ignore them (Ubuntu) or they just don't. For many years Debian and Fedora didn't have MP3 decoder installed by default.

    • Foxboron  8 years ago

      Distributing them as repackaged binaries would be against the terms. I'm unsure what distros ignores the terms and packages them anyway. It is a clear liability for any larger distributions at least.

Foxboron  8 years ago

What packages would you like to se inn our repositories?

  • Aardwolf  8 years ago

    Imho, especially things that are important solutions to common things on the Archwiki but are AUR, indicated with the AUR superscript there.

    For example for MTP: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Media_Transfer_Protocol The one that worked most stable for me was simple-mtpfs, but it's AUR.

    It happens with other archwiki topics too, I encounter it regularly though can't think of good examples from the top of my head currently. E.g. the btrfs article mentions several AUR utilities though admittedly nothing important I need right now :)

    And then some important development tools, like closure-compiler https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/closure-compiler/

    • Foxboron  8 years ago

      >simple-mtpfs

      Not maintained (last commit in 2016). So that will be something low on the priority list.

      >btrfs

      The dedupe tool looks interesting. Noted on my todo.

      >closure-compiler

      Was dropped from the repository. Probably because of the lack of an maintainer.

      4 replies →

    • chungy  8 years ago

      For MTP: gvfs-mtp is in the main repos, and pretty much the fullest-featured MTP implementation that exists, which includes all the extensions Android made to it to turn it into a block-oriented file system.

      Honestly, MTP is terrible on every OS though. Mac and Windows have it a _lot_ worse for interacting with MTP devices.