>> Look here EBo, go help maintain a Linux distro for a couple of years and >> THEN come back and tell us your "package managers are wonderful" swill. I >> don't think you've even packaged up one piece of software. You can't >> have if >> you're promoting package managers so much.
well let me see, I think I shared my first portage ebuild in 2004. I have had Sunrise commit privileges for a year or two now, and have posted a few additions, upgrades, and bug fixes along the way. In addition, I am working toward becoming an official Gentoo developer and am negotiating taking over maintenance of the plan9port, 9vx, and inferno ebuilds for Gentoo and getting the ones which are not already in the main tree to be added. And as Ron alluded to below, I just got a 9vx package accepted into the standard packages of TinyCoreLinux (called Tvx). But by your standards this does not sound like enough experience to justify an opinion. The basis of my opinion, however, comes from administrating and software development for systems, networks and clusters over the last 25 years. >From a sys admin point of view I often do not have the time to upgrade a system unless I know I can downgrade it if necessary. I have to be able to do this quickly. And no, I do not expect for the upstream maintainers to do this for me and I have 206 ebuilds in my private overlay (I just counted them). > As nemo points out, "relax". > > EBo just did a very good thing for all of us: 9vx is part of a distro. > I think he's got some credibility at this point :-) Thank you Ron for a call for civility. Reflecting over all this I think that I do not yet know how to communicate in the 9fans' language, and that much of the misunderstandings stem from simple miscommunication. I'll learn with time, and I hope I will not be to annoying in the process. But the couple of times I have seen this kind of vehemence in the past with other code bases it stemmed from software systems which had no package management and difficult build/configure systems. The end result was that new users would either get discouraged and drift off, or they would spend literally hundreds of hours to just get to the point where they can dependably configure, build, and run the code. An interesting consequence of this is that any proposed non-trivial change is met by the old-timers with a resounding "DON'T TOUCH IT!!!" And there is good reasons for this -- namely that it took some of these people a year or more (quite literally) of training and experience to understand how to maintain the systems. A significant change will cause them to have to go back and learn the new system, and they remember what happened the last two or three times that happened. I have to wonder if the same this applies to the Plan 9 community. If so, the best way to move forward will be to fork the code. EBo --
