AUR Packages that should really end up in official repos!

What a strange blog topic, but something I'd like to document since I really think the only failing of Arch is the rate of official adoption of aur packages.

As a preface, I won't mention anything proprietary, because most of those packages can only be in the AUR due to the legality of distribution. Also, why would the Arch support infrastructure bear the burden of distributing other peoples proprietary blob? Though they do have some proprietary software in their repos, such as Steam and Flash, I'm not going to harp on anyone for not serving up server space for other peoples binaries.

First group - games. Plenty of games and game engines are already in community, so any foss game engine has no excuse (assuming it isn't brand new) for not getting adopted.

• darkplaces (quake engine)
• eduke32 + eduke32-dukeplus (duke3d engine)
• freedoom (entirely free game assets for doom!)
• gzdoom (doom engine)
• hexen2 (hammer of thyrion)
• openarena (foss quake 3 fork)
• zandronum (foss doom engine with multiplayer)

And the second group is a plethora of KDE and qt apps and documentation that all seem to have 100+ votes but are still not in the main repos:

• kcm-ufw
• kcmsystemd
• kde-thumbnailer-epub
• kdeartwork-sounds
• kdeplasma-applets-networkmanagement
• kdeplasma-applets-starfield-wallpaper
• kdeplasma-applets-veromix
• skanlite
• qt5-examples
• qt5-jsbackend

I would say that a lot of these aformentioned packages all include a lot of data files like models, textures, and sounds that would take up huge amounts of server space - and I'd completely understand not including that in the main repos, if it was not for the fact games like 0 A.D. and Xonotic have their data hosted in official repos.

I also get a lot of the second set of packages I mention require the input of the original authors who may be MIA. That would explain a lot of it. And maybe some of the first group just outright said no to official Arch packaging, who knows.

I just think moving forward Arch will need to consider ramping up the process of pulling the most popular and longest running AUR packages that aren't proprietary into offical repos. My impression is that it doesn't happen nearly enough, and that can lead to overdependence on the aur when pacman and its repository system works so well. Being constrained to pkgbuilding everything you use isn't the right answer, but neither is a laissez faire avenue to getting anything into official repos on a whim.