You also don't put any obligations on yourself by becoming a maintainer on AUR — you can always orphan a package in less than a minute, no questions asked. Some users actually place new packages on AUR and orphan them right away. If it's of any use, it usually get a volunteer maintainer within a few days.
Thank goodness. There is no other free Linux distro out there which gives the benefits of both a stable release with great support for most of the latest hardware AND rapid package/kernel updates (approaching a rolling release). This must not be easy since its so rare. Whatever they are doing regarding maintainership is working very well from what I can tell.
This has nothing to do with that. They could absolutely make it easier for new people without harming their quality. For God's sake just better documentation would help, and I don't see how they're going to lose hardware support because they wrote one canonical page with all the info you need. The process should be more of a checklist to complete, and less of post-crime forensic investigation where tons of details and tips are missing and people have to draw flow charts and hunt for missing information just to figure out what the next step should be. Your reply is a (very) shallow dismissal of an actual issue and (assuming you're not alone) probably the reason this is such a problem in the first place.
What a strange POV. "Thank goodness x and y are blocked off."
Now make the same argument for proprietary software. "Thank goodness x or y don't allow just randos to touch their source code and make PRs. That'd be DISASTROUS!"
Maybe it is shortsighted in the long run? We'll see. I'm glad that we have choices -- AUR on one hand, Fedora on the other (and Debian, Alpine, etc)
The community and main repositories have some stability guarantees but that doesn't stop you from orphaning the package.
If you see the distros with more red tape ( cough debian cough ) , you have people "reigning in their little Package Kingdom" which also can end up with orphaned (or at least severely neglected) packages
~x86 helps too, masking a package is a good way to say "maybe tested, maybe not so much".
Ideally? nix build someflake would just work. Reality is there's a few hoops at the moment which is kind of a disappointing aspect.
If nix build someflake Just Worked I could see a lot more ad-hoc type contributions happening. Better still unlike makepkg its very easy to customize a package so presumably fewer same-but-slight-variant type things tha aur has a lot of would be consolidated.
but who is investing this time and bandwidth?
It seems like this sort of governance model allows politics to replace egalitarianism or meritocracy. I could have become a Debian contributor/packager many times over, but it always seemed not worth it for a thankless job which is mostly dealing with bureaucracy and red tape instead of actually solving technical matters.
(To be fair, I've since moved on to Funtoo, which, like Gentoo, is very egalitarian -- but requires a certain, rather high, level of technical interest and expertise which is its own filtering function. On the other hand, Debian's packaging policies are very strict, and many distributions have much less strict packaging policies.)
How do the less-difficult distributions such as Arch or Alpine do it with less overhead (and is that better or worse?)
How does one start a successful monastery, by the way?
This would repeat until he was nearly running to get the route done in time. At this point things got boring, so he'd use his seniority to switch to a new route. That mean some poor low-seniority sucker would get assigned his very demanding route and struggle desperately with it, finishing very late.
My point being that some people like being heroes, at least for a while. It seems to me kinda like the way I like running races: fun as an occasional challenge partly because doing something unsustainable causes me to push myself.
The stuff that's not already packaged tends to have 50 dependencies that aren't packaged, and need a version of Node that isn't packaged yet, etc.
For existing stuff, people are probably afraid the current maintainer is gonna do a better job than them, they don't want to mess something up, since breaking changes filter in from every package.
Android solves this by putting stuff in the os itself maintained by paid people, and not doing package management like Linux.
Nix solves it by making it easy to package stuff and allowing multiple versions. You can go from never used Nix to writing packages in hours to days.
Other distros put much more work on humans.
Generally all of us needs to be better at pitching in where we can and not be depended on a few people overworking themselves.