You do have a point, to some extent. There are a few reasons why the current approach still makes sense, at least in my opinion:
Some of the packages are "just" taken from the AUR. For those packages, the repo serves as a "convenience" – you just don't have to build the packages yourself.
In most cases, though, PKGBUILDS need to be slightly (or heavily) modified to be buildable on aarch64. That's what we do with this repo.
Also, some packages take a looong time to build, so we're offering the choice for people to build things themselves or to just pick a binary.
Your main point is still moot, imho, as we absolutely point out where PKGBUILDs are coming from, where our modifications can be viewed and thus used to build things yourself, should you not want to put trust into a random repo (which is very understandable). And we actually _do_ try to get things upstreamed, where feasible – bitwarden and riot had once been part of the repo and aren't anymore; jitsi-meet and librewolf are actually maintained by us/me in the AUR as well; the ferdi-AUR-maintainer got a PR etc.
Sometimes, upstream or AUR maintainers are not interested in aarch64, and in some cases (like with signal) upstreaming would be a _huge_ effort, for which there currently is not enough time available.
And sometimes the current solutions to build things are just somewhat hacky or not super-clean, and not necessarily in a state where upstreaming or submission to the AUR would be reasonable.
So to sum it up: feel free to use the repo, or to ignore the repo and just grab the PKGBUILDs to build things yourself – we encourage that! That's why you have a choice.
If you want things to get upstreamed sooner: Things are open and available – why not just do the work yourself? :)
Until then, we'll just keep maintaining things, while giving people the choice to trust us with binaries – or to just go to the source and use the resources there to build things on their own, without having to figure out on their own how to get things built on aarch64 in those cases where it's more complicated.
Some of the packages are "just" taken from the AUR. For those packages, the repo serves as a "convenience" – you just don't have to build the packages yourself.
In most cases, though, PKGBUILDS need to be slightly (or heavily) modified to be buildable on aarch64. That's what we do with this repo.
Also, some packages take a looong time to build, so we're offering the choice for people to build things themselves or to just pick a binary.
Your main point is still moot, imho, as we absolutely point out where PKGBUILDs are coming from, where our modifications can be viewed and thus used to build things yourself, should you not want to put trust into a random repo (which is very understandable). And we actually _do_ try to get things upstreamed, where feasible – bitwarden and riot had once been part of the repo and aren't anymore; jitsi-meet and librewolf are actually maintained by us/me in the AUR as well; the ferdi-AUR-maintainer got a PR etc.
Sometimes, upstream or AUR maintainers are not interested in aarch64, and in some cases (like with signal) upstreaming would be a _huge_ effort, for which there currently is not enough time available.
And sometimes the current solutions to build things are just somewhat hacky or not super-clean, and not necessarily in a state where upstreaming or submission to the AUR would be reasonable.
So to sum it up: feel free to use the repo, or to ignore the repo and just grab the PKGBUILDs to build things yourself – we encourage that! That's why you have a choice.
If you want things to get upstreamed sooner: Things are open and available – why not just do the work yourself? :)
Until then, we'll just keep maintaining things, while giving people the choice to trust us with binaries – or to just go to the source and use the resources there to build things on their own, without having to figure out on their own how to get things built on aarch64 in those cases where it's more complicated.
