My understanding is some things (e.g. Google Chrome, Google and Microsoft fonts) can't be put in the main Arch Linux repos for copyright reasons.

Chromium and Google's Roboto and Noto fonts are all in the official repos.

Yeah, Chromium, which is FOSS, not Google Chrome, and Google Noto Fonts, which are also FOSS.

Anything proprietary can't simply be copied over and mirrored for copyright reasons.

I wonder how other distributions solve that situation.

By being popular enough to have providers package the software for them. For example, Chrome is available from a repo maintained by Google itself.

https://www.google.com/linuxrepositories/

OTOH, you're basically giving Google root access to your machine.

Either ignore them (Ubuntu) or they just don't. For many years Debian and Fedora didn't have MP3 decoder installed by default.

Distributing them as repackaged binaries would be against the terms. I'm unsure what distros ignores the terms and packages them anyway. It is a clear liability for any larger distributions at least.

What packages would you like to se inn our repositories?

Imho, especially things that are important solutions to common things on the Archwiki but are AUR, indicated with the AUR superscript there.

For example for MTP: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Media_Transfer_Protocol The one that worked most stable for me was simple-mtpfs, but it's AUR.

It happens with other archwiki topics too, I encounter it regularly though can't think of good examples from the top of my head currently. E.g. the btrfs article mentions several AUR utilities though admittedly nothing important I need right now :)

And then some important development tools, like closure-compiler https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/closure-compiler/

>simple-mtpfs

Not maintained (last commit in 2016). So that will be something low on the priority list.

>btrfs

The dedupe tool looks interesting. Noted on my todo.

>closure-compiler

Was dropped from the repository. Probably because of the lack of an maintainer.

> Not maintained (last commit in 2016). So that will be something low on the priority list.

I see! Time for me to start looking for a new method of transfering files from android then, thanks for the heads up

There's a very nice open source sshd daemon based on dropbear that I use. Doesn't require root or anything. I use it for pretty much all my file transfer needs. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.galexander...

Honestly I've always found MTP to be incredibly slow and sometimes unreliable.

I personally just install termux, which allows you to install openssh. Run sshd and then you can use rsync or scp or sshfs or other from the host PC.

KDE Connect allows transferring individual files or browsing the Android filesystem, in addition to all its other goodies.

For MTP: gvfs-mtp is in the main repos, and pretty much the fullest-featured MTP implementation that exists, which includes all the extensions Android made to it to turn it into a block-oriented file system.

Honestly, MTP is terrible on every OS though. Mac and Windows have it a _lot_ worse for interacting with MTP devices.

>Not spelling AUR right

Honestly AUR has covered everything I've needed.

I package for Arch so the question is what the author wants in our repositories. Not in AUR.