DeveloperWiki:ArchlinuxOrg Services - ArchWiki

# 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  - Provides: News, Repo Listings, Out of date reporting, developer wiki, developer information, donation information, documentation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  - Issues: none, documentation has few contributors and falls out of date easily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: none

- 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: 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 - CVS, SVN, GIT
  - Provides: Tracking for PKGBUILDs, arch site, scripts and related projects
  - Audience: developers, advanced users
  - Status: operational
  - Issues: CVS migration needs to be finished.

- Newsletter/Magazine
  - Provides: Concise aggreggation of arch related activity over small timespans.
  - Audience: everyone
  - Status: monthly releases
  - Issues: none

## 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.

Category:

- DeveloperWiki