this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
770 points (99.1% liked)

Linux

48082 readers
930 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Timothée Besset, a software engineer who works on the Steam client for Valve, took to Mastodon this week to reveal: “Valve is seeing an increasing number of bug reports for issues caused by Canonical’s repackaging of the Steam client through snap”.

“We are not involved with the snap repackaging. It has a lot of issues”, Besset adds, noting that “the best way to install Steam on Debian and derivative operating systems is to […] use the official .deb”.

Those who don’t want to use the official Deb package are instead asked to ‘consider the Flatpak version’ — though like Canonical’s Steam snap the Steam Flatpak is also unofficial, and no directly supported by Valve.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Usually what you describe is what they do. Someone "owns" the AUR package (and it's not quite literally any random user IIRC - you have to be accepted as an AUR maintainer I think) and they then take on the responsibility to repackage it whenever the author (you) releases a new version. There is also a mechanism for users to flag the AUR package as out of date in case that maintainer misses a release, and if they abandon it (or even if folks just don't like how they package it) someone else can package it, assuming someone else wants to.

Sometimes the AUR maintainer is the dev themselves. I can't think of a good example currently, but I know I've seen it before.

I don't know the process for how things end up in the official repos, but I would guess it's similar to however any other distros identify software they want to officially package.