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Comment by keenerd | Hacker News Reader

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?

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.

hehe, came here to thank the arch team[s], I've been smooth sailing for a few years on top of their creation.

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]

Right, thanks are upstream recursively transitive.

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

Another archer here, since the 2009.

I'd add bittorrent-sync. Encrypted, de-centralized Dropbox replacement.

That isn't free (as in open source), so I left that out.

Fair enough.

They claim to be thinking about open sourcing it, so there may be hope yet.

Meanwhile... https://github.com/calmh/syncthing

shutter +1

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

aarddict as offline wiki reader

gpa, the gnu privacy assistant

qgis is free GIS

gimagereader is nice OCR

Vagrant!

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/

[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.

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

[1]https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=173781

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

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