Arch Linux User Repository

@alub

Thanks for your work and commitment maintaining this PKGBUILD

1  # Maintainer: Jonathan Neidel <aur@jneidel.com>
2  # Contributor: willemw <willemw12@gmail.com>
3  # Contributor: gnomeye <gnomeye at gmail dot com>

You should add your name to that list.

An AUR user flagged this package as obsolete, 

No, no, no. This tool is definetely not obsolete.

This "task-spooler" is an extremely usefull and underrated simple little tool, used by many of us. It's just that it's original web page, http://viric.name/soft/ts/ is a bit messy and badly maintained.

• It is very "unixy", very universal.
• It does ONE thing and it does it well.
• It is old and still works perfectely fine without major bugs.

Very small, an incredible 70KB,

Name            : task-spooler
Description     : Queue up tasks from the shell for batch execution
URL             : https://viric.name/soft/ts/
Installed Size  : 69.96 KiB

The only other similar alternative are,

pueue, an official Arch package, also modern, very well maintained, but big (12MB) and written in Rust,

Name            : pueue
Description     : A CLI tool for managing long running shell commands
URL             : https://github.com/nukesor/pueue
Installed Size  : 11.95 MiB

Another one is a fork of "task-spooler" on github, https://github.com/justanhduc/task-spooler also called "task-spooler".

• doesnt bring that much anything new for the simple use cases of "task-spooler"
• more focused on running on GPU's, CUDA like etc
• more complicated compilation with cmake
• ...

There is also "nq" made by a very competent developer,

• https://github.com/leahneukirchen/nq
• https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nq

But I, personally, never ended up using it since task-spooler was enough for me.

Hello, I’ve incorporated the requested changes, thanks for the suggestions!

An AUR user flagged this package as obsolete, I don’t have upstream notifications.

The aarch64 architecture (e.g., RPi4) could also be relevant.

Also, the license should be GPL-2.0-or-later, now that Arch has started using SPDX compæiant license identifiers.

Quoting the file "PORTABILITY"

ANSI C and POSIX

The code should compile without any warning in a system providing an
ANSI C compiler and a Single Unix Specification rev 5 library. I tried
only with glibc.

If you find any inconsistency between the code and this statement,
please let know the auther.

That is true. It even has zero dependecies. I my self have been running task-spooler on Arch Linux Arm for years (Raspberry Pi 2b)

Could you please change,

arch=('x86_64')

To

`arch=('x86_64' 'armv7h')

Thanks in advance.

$ wget https://viric.name/soft/ts/ts-1.0.3.tar.gz

$ tar tf ts-1.0.3.tar.gz

ts-1.0.3/.hg_archival.txt
.....
ts-1.0.3/Changelog
....
ts-1.0.3/OBJECTIVES
ts-1.0.3/PORTABILITY
....
ts-1.0.3/README
ts-1.0.3/TRICKS
....... lotz of stuff
ts-1.0.3/web/ts-0.5.4.ebuild

You already do this for "TRICKS",

  install -Dm644 $_srcname-$pkgver/TRICKS -t "$pkgdir/usr/share/doc/$pkgname

Could you please make sure that at least the very useful "Changelog" also ends up in

/usr/share/doc/task-spooler/Changelog

Thanks in advance

PS: I am curious how you got notified of a new release available ?

I tried the page, https://viric.name/soft/ts/ and nothing works there. Not the mailing list, not the google groups not the web based source code viewer. The links are broken or only old messages in the mailing lists.

Even debian, https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=task+spooler&searchon=names&suite=stable&section=all , seems to be stuck in version 1.0.1 and have not noticed any updates to 1.0.3

@m040601 & @kseistrup I've reverted to generic source, while keeping the arch as is. Thus communicating that it is an x86 package, but you may try to build it anyway:

https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/commit/?h=task-spooler&id=6973b2981fa1cf49ad061d309599a6aba026c04e

@m040601 The archcitecture field is meant to indicate which architecture the final package can run on: A *-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst can run only on the x86_64 platform, not on an ARM processor, and so on. A good example of an “any” package is a package containing a python module in pure python.

Task spooler is a binary program that will run only on the platform for which is has been compiled, therefore “any” is the wrong choice. See PKGBUILD(5) for details.

The reason why it failed before was because the maintainer had put source_x86_64=(…) in PKGBUILD, where it should just have been source=(…). When _x86_64 has been removed from source_x86_64 and sha256sums_x86_64, people will be able to answer Y to the “Compile anyway?” question.

It is, of course, also possible to create an array of all possible architectures.

Task spooler works in "any" architecture.

If you dont want to put "any", just change it to

arch=('x86_64' 'arm' 'armv7h' 'armv6h' 'aarch64' )

(ex, https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=yay)

@m040601 task-spooler is not an “any” package, additional architectures have to be added explicitly.

However, the PKGBUILD has e.g. source_x86_64=…, something that should be just source=….

Some adjustments are still needed after the recent merges in this PKGBUILD

I was trying to update "task-spooler" in my Archlinux systems. I'm using yay.

On my x86 system,

:: 1 package to upgrade/install.
1  aur/task-spooler  1.0.2-2 -> 1.0.2-4

All seems OK, havent noticed any problem.

But, on my Archlinux ARM system (armv7h), where I have been using task-spooler for years,

:: (1/1) Parsing SRCINFO: task-spooler
 -> The following packages are not compatible with your architecture:
  task-spooler
:: Try to build them anyway? [Y/n]

I answered yes, as I have been doing for years, because "task-spooler" does work in multiple architectures. You can see in the Debian page that it is indeed available for x86, arm, mips, etc, https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/task-spooler

Then,

==> Starting prepare()...
/dev/shm/aurdesty/task-spooler/PKGBUILD: line 19: cd: ts-1.0.2: No such file or directory
==> ERROR: A failure occurred in prepare().
    Aborting...
 -> error making: task-spooler-exit status 4
 -> Failed to install the following packages. Manual intervention is required:
task-spooler - exit status 4

Hmmmm .... that line "...task-spooler/PKGBUILD: line 19: cd: ts-1.0.2: No such file or directory" is really strange. What is that "ts" still doing there ?. Tried a clean build, same problem.

So anyway, this PKGBUILD needs a change in

arch=('x86_64')

to something like

arch=('any')