Re: Adopting similar packages in extra

[Christian Rebischke]

Hi Quentin,

I think the common understanding was that we do not want to have any forks in our repositories.

The existence of sudo-rs surprised me, because when I tried to push similar packages to our repositories in the past I got a huge backlash and 100 lines of IRC spam why pushing "just another fork of XY" is a bad idea and that person XY would remove the package if I dare to push it.

Redis is a different story. Redis got dropped, because of license changes.

Maybe someone can enlighten us and give us an update.

On Jun 9, 2025 22:55, Quentin Michaud <mh4ckt3mh4ckt1...@archlinux.org> wrote:

Hi all,

I am interested in packaging vscodium [1] into extra but am worried that
it would be seen as a duplicate of the code [2] package. This situation
is unclear and not explicitly mentioned in the wiki [3]. I asked the
question on Matrix/IRC and this stirred a larger debate, so artafinde
suggested me to post the question here in order to have a record of the
discussion and potential decisions.

The (more generic) questions are the following: under which criteria do
we want to accept multiple "similar" packages in official repos or
replace one by another? Do we want to fix (or already have) rules or
guidelines for these situations or do we want to proceed on a
case-by-case basis?

"similar" packages can mean different things, I see several categories:

- Hard fork of a project but projects are very close / are trying to
stay compatible. Examples : redis (AUR) / valkey (extra), terraform
(extra) / opentofu (extra)
- Soft fork of a project aiming at adding / removing functionalities
using patches. Examples : vscode (extra) / vscodium (AUR), firefox
(extra) / librewolf (AUR) and other Firefox forks
- Rewrite of a project but aiming to achieve the exact same goals /
drop-in replacement : Examples: sudo (core) / sudo-rs (extra), coreutils
(core) / uutils (extra). This category is tricky because the definition
of "exact same goals" is unclear, but I exclude software that implement
common standards but that are vastly different in practice, such as
docker / podman or openssh / dropbear. This is more relevant to the
"replace one by another" part, as Ubuntu did recently with sudo [4].

As for the criteria on which to base these decisions, they are many but
the most important ones that I was able to think of are:
- licensing changes
- user impact
- compatibility / conflicts between forks / flavors of the same software

I hope thinking and discussing about this will help us to set guidelines
on how to handle such situations in the future and document it in the wiki.

Your thoughts are welcome :)

Cheers,
Quentin Michaud / mh4ckt3mh4ckt1c4s

[1]: https://vscodium.com/
[2]: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/code/
[3]:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Package_Maintainer_guidelines#Rules_for_packages_entering_the_extra_repository
[4]:
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/adopting-sudo-rs-by-default-in-ubuntu-25-10/60583