DeveloperWiki:ArchlinuxOrg Services

This is a list of basic sites and services we provide at archlinux.org, their status, and any outstanding concerns people have had with them.

Current Services

• Main Site
  • Provides: News, Repo Listings, Out of date reporting, developer wiki, developer information, donation information, documentation
  • Audience: everyone
  • Status: operational
  • Issues: none, documentation has few contributors and falls out of date easily

• Forums
  • Provides: place to discuss anything arch related, and even non-arch related, general announcements
  • Audience: starting point for newer users, few older users, some non-users. Most people seem to start here and gravitate away over time.
  • Status: operational
  • Issues: none

• Wiki
  • Provides: user-based documentation, tutorials, etc
  • Audience: newer users, many older users
  • Status: operational
  • Issues: theme is out of whack due to applying main page css. Organization is poor, some users have tried to fix the situation. Some suggested a move away from mediawiki. Spam issues.

• Bug Tracker
  • Provides: place to report distro-centric problems directly to developers
  • Audience: everyone
  • Status: operational
  • Issues: none

• AUR
  • Provides: Central repository for user-contributed PKGBUILDs, managment for community repo
  • Audience: TUs and more experienced users who are able to create and maintain pkgbuilds.
  • Status: operational, with many known issues, slow development
  • Issues: Has not been re-themed for the rest of arch site. Codebase is messy and hard to work with. Slow development but rapid growth of userbase. Klunky interface.

• Mailing Lists
  • Provide: Place to discuss everything arch-related, including the distro, development, pacman, aur, and porting. Generally very on-topic.
  • Audience: Users who wish to discuss those particular topics. Usually slightly more experienced users and those inclined to use email.
  • Status: operational
  • Issues: none

• IRC channels
  • Provide: Live dicussion about arch, arch development, and localized dicussion. Often other topics as well.
  • Audience: Full range of users, often those who are IRC-inclined.
  • Status: operational
  • Issues: none

• Planet Arch
  • Provides: aggregation of arch-related blogs and feeds
  • Audience: unsure
  • Status: operational
  • Issues: poor visibility, tracks very old entries leading to large page size

• Package Repositories
  • Provides: Basic and expanded package sets for the distro. FTP for little-used direct access. Rsync for mirroring access.
  • Audience: all users
  • Status: operational
  • Issues: bandwidth is a limiting factor when large upgrades occur, leads to mirror sync issues

• Revision Control
  • Provides: Tracking for PKGBUILDs, arch site, and scripts.
  • Audience: developers, advanced users
  • Status: operational
  • Issues: none, however moves from CVS to SVN have been suggested.

• Newsletter
  • Provides: Concise aggreggation of arch related activity over small timespans.
  • Audience: everyone
  • Status: biweekly releases
  • Issues: release schedule is often not followed. lacks contributors

Removed Services

• Development Blog
  • Provided: place to post arch development related items that are not quite front page newsworthy. Place for some community projects to post updates
  • Status: Removed
  • Issues: poor visibility, and little use
  • Replaced by: Forum announcement section, which has been integrated into the planet feeds.

• Arch Artwork Gallery
  • Provided: place for users to post screenshots and arch-related images
  • Status: Removed
  • Issues: poor visibility, little use
  • Replaced by: Nothing. The users historically used the forum for screenshot threads, and free image hosting sites. This trend continues.

• Pastebin
  • Provides: Place to share snippets of text
  • Audience: mostly IRC users, but pretty much anyone
  • Status: Removed
  • Issues: Spam issues. It was little used.