aurman: aurman sucks, you suck, you are a bad programmer, aurman should be deleted from the wiki table since it is not working 90% of the time

Lately I am receiving more and more messages, the worst ones via email (obviously), criticizing aurman itself, me as software developer and as person in general. Hence I am making the following statement once, there will be no other statement regarding this problems.

First the kind of “objective” criticism, not cited word by word, but what the people meant:

"You shithead broke aurman twice during the last week, at first you have not been able to release aurman in a proper way for pacman 5.1, second you are too dumb to get your dependencies right, an urllib3 update broke aurman again.

pacman 5.1 had been pushed to “staging” with an announcement on reddit, whereas pyalpm, a dependency of aurman at that point, failed to build. see reddit comment and github issue I did not know at that point, when pacman was going to hit “Core”, hence I had to make the following decision: Hope that pyalpm gets fixed for the pacman release, so that everything is fine, or remove the pyalpm dependency so that a pacman 5.1 release with broken pyalpm does not break aurman. I decided for the latter, see: remove pyalpm issue Now there was the problem with a versioned pacman dependency, “new” aurman not working without pacman 5.1 due to the usage of pacman-conf, and “old” aurman not working with pacman 5.1 due to the failing build of pyalpm at that point. As suggested by @AladW I updated the PKGBUILD of the “old” aurman pacman<5.1 and prepared the PKGBUILD of the “new” aurman pacman>=5.1. I obviously did not push the “new” aurman because I did not know when pacman 5.1 would hit “Core”.

pacman 5.1 was pushed to “Core” in the same night (german time), I woke up because of my non stop vibrating smartphone, since I received direct emails, notifications of github and aur.archlinux.org, reminding me that I may please release the new PKGBUILD, which is perfectly fine. I got up and released that PKGBUILD, see: aur.archlinux.org commit

Later that day I started receiving the first emails mentioning my incompetence to handle a pacman update in a proper way, because users have not been able to solve the following “problem”: :: aurman: installing pacman (5.1.0-1) breaks dependency 'pacman<5.1' Well, obviously that is not a “bug” or a “problem”, just an occasion where the user has to do something manually, namely “remove aurman, update the system, install the current aurman version”. But yeah, I guess I should stop developing software.

Now for the second time at which I broke aurman. The update of python-urllib3 - archlinux.org commit aurman uses python-requests as direct dependency for the AUR RPC queries. The current python-requests version 2.18.4 depends on urllib3<1.23, whereas urllib3 1.23 had been released. A few hours later, the python-requests arch package got a new pkgbuild, see: requests version bump with a small, dirty hack to change the versioned dependency. That lead to python-requests being usable, but still emitting a warning after executing a python program using it. See: python requests pull request which is needed, to also remove the warning. As you can see, it was totally me who broke aurman, again.

There was a comment on the aurman aur.archlinux.org page mentioning how unstable aurman is, hence i should start to test my software instead of releasing “patches” every day. Obviously I do test aurman, and those “patches” are mostly new features as requested by users. There are a few bug fixes, sure, and I do agree that it is unusual to release a new aurman version that often, but I want to keep it that way, since this is Arch Linux and not Debian. If one does not like frequent updates, do not use Arch Linux or use --ignore aurman when updating.

Now for the “not objective” criticism. I’m an asshole, should stop developing open source software, and should admit that aurman is shitty instead of closing issues on github, just because i am not able to fix complex things. I am honestly not even sure which issues that is referring to, but well, okay.

I am developing aurman for myself, in the first place. I used pacaur, which is no longer being developed, hence I looked for a replacement and decided to write my own AUR Helper. I am using open source software for many years and like the idea behind it, so I decided to work on aurman as an open source project with a MIT license. I am always grateful for bug reports and sensible feature requests, but I am simply not going to implement everything users want. I do this in my free time, if I can’t find motivation to implement some thing like support for other languages or zsh completion, I am simply not going to do it. In those cases it has nothing to do with “I don’t want to see this feature in aurman” but simply lack of motivation to implement those things. Anyone may implement those and open a PR, as I have written in the regarding issues.

For other features I simply do not want to implement them, because I would never use them and I personally do not the see general usecase. In those cases I’d also not merge PRs, which you may dislike, but because of that I released aurman under the MIT license. Everyone may fork aurman and implement features as many as wanted, deal with it.

Final words: I really like working on this project, I’ve learned a lot and met many nice people. I’ve also received many nice comments, emails etc, which I really appreciate, but lately I start to lose motivation, because of all this bullshit. I do not want to stop working on this project in the way I am doing it right now, but I also do not want to deal with this negative shit. Hence I’ll simply not respond to any kind of those things, be it rude comments, not using the issue template for bug reports or not reading the readme. I’ll simply close those issues, delete comments and ban users from this repository in case of repeatedly doing those things. If you encounter your issue to be closed and you really don’t know why, just email me or explain in detail in the issue why you think closing it was wrong. I’m not a monster, but I’ll start handling this repository in a different way from now on. If you want bugs to be fixed or new features to be implemented, I guess it’s not too much to ask for writing more than one sentence which doesn’t even really explain what you want, since all in all I’ve got the work to fix and implement things, not you, unless you provide a PR.