Arch Linux User Repository

First of all thanks to everyone who has been maintaining this "ts" PKGBUILD all these years. A very old and underrated tool.

A question and observation from the point of view of an AUR end user. Not an AUR or PKGBUILD's expert.

This "ts" PKGBUILD was first submitted in 2007. There is another PKGBUILD, called "task-spooler", first submitted in 2017, https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/task-spooler .

After wasting a lot of time, confused, I'm 99% convinced that they both provide the same tool.

They even both pull from Debian, and apply some patches Debian has for this tool.

The PKGBUILD "task-spooler" even takes a little more care and attention, renaming the tool from 'ts' to 'tsp'

# Rename ts to tsp, which is also done in other distros.
# File /usr/bin/ts is owned by package community/moreutils.
mv "$pkgdir"/usr/bin/{ts,tsp}
mv "$pkgdir"/usr/share/man/man1/{ts,tsp}.1

Which is a very good idea, since it would collide with an official Arch package.

So my observation and question is:

It only confuses end AUR users to have duplicated tools and similar names in the AUR. It only makes wasting time searching the AUR, and comparing the differences. It's a waste of effort that could be better used, with more people maintaining and watching one single PKGBUILD.

So, and even though this "ts" PKGBUILD is older than the "task-spooler" PKGBUILD PKGBUILD, does it still make sense to keep it around ?

Wouldnt we all be better served if the people maintaining "ts" and "task-spooler" just joined together ?

Thanks in advance.

@amo: very good idea and I would probably be in favor of switching. However, this package follows the official Debian (patched) version. Debian and maybe other distros base their 'ts' package on the https://viric.name/soft/ts version.

Probably it will be better and more clear to create a separate task-spooler-justanhduc* package for the justanhduc fork (unless other distros switch to this fork).

There seems to be a fork by justanhduc with a few more features. It also looks more maintained than the original project. I'd like to suggest switching to the fork, what do you think?

Upstream URL is faulty or website is down :/

@m040601: Thanks. Corrected. The installed name has always been 'tsp' previously (see any version of the PKGBUILD file).

Thanks for providing this PKGBUILD

You have to be more carefull and pay more attention with this PKGBUILD

Such simple named executables like 'ts' 'tsp' , often colide with other ( more important) already installed stuff in /usr/bin/

You should do this check for such short and simple commands like, ex 'ts'

pacman -F ts

and indeed it collides with other stuff from the Arch Official Repos

extra/irssi 1.2.2-4
    usr/share/irssi/help/ts
community/lout 3.40-2
    usr/lib/lout/include/ts
community/moreutils 0.65-1 [installed]
    usr/bin/ts
community/ucblogo 6.1-1
    usr/lib/logo/helpfiles/ts

So, you'll have to choose another name other than 'ts'.

We're talking about collision with official Arch Packages, not other Aur packages.

As you can see, in my case, because I had 'moreutils' installed, the 'task-spooler' installation aborts:

(1/1) checking for file conflicts                   [--------------------------] 100%
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
task-spooler: /usr/bin/ts exists in filesystem (owned by moreutils)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

@annata83: Thanks. Switching back to the Debian source files.

==> ERROR: Failure while downloading http://vicerveza.homeunix.net/~viric/soft/ts/ts-1.0.1.tar.gz

@DankWarrior: Thanks. Using now the source files stored in the Debian repo.