On Mar 28 17:24, Christopher Faylor wrote: > I can't speak for Corinna, but I would rather *not* have to be the bad > guy or a single (double?) point of contact. I would rather have more > community involvement. I'm already drowning in being the focal point > for most cygwin bugs with help from only two other developers. I don't > want to invent new things for me or Corinna to do, especially when there > is no requirement for in-depth cygwin knowledge.
I second the idea of a community driven cygwin net distribution and I would say that it's basically already the case. It's just that the appoval and review process is a bit... well, uncontrolled or unreliable. Therefore to have a sort of a commitee, a bunch of people who feel responsible for the net distro, would probably be a good idea. However, I think Chris and I shouldn't be involved much in this process at all. I can't speak for Chris, but I told him once on the phone, that from my point of view we are just maintainers for one component of the net distro, the Cygwin package itself (ignoring for now the other random packages which we maintain). > Setting up a council or committee to approve or disprove apps means > that the load is shared and there theoretically a consistent way for > packages to be included. With both of us not being member of the comittee, IMO. A veto right would be ok but it should only be excersised when absolutely necessary (e. g. legal problems). > >Another approach might be to ask: "Do the Linux vendors support it?". > > That is exactly an idea that I was going to propose. I was waiting to > see where the discussion was going first. I was going to use actually > veto ac-archive on this basis but then noticed that when I typed: > > up2date ac-archive > > ac-archive got pulled into my fedora-based system. So vetoing ac-archive > because for this reason wouldn't work. Hmm. I don't like the idea. We should really keep in mind that 1. All Linux distros are different 2. Cygwin is not Linux Which distro of Linux will we use as role model? Red Hat? Fedora? SuSE? Debian? Connectiva? Which version? What if a package is in, say, Debian Woody but not in Red Hat 9? And why should that be a rule? Cygwin is not Linux. Cygwin doesn't support all function calls of a Linux system. Also some vanilla package maintainers ignore Windows based systems or even refuse to make any patches to accomodate them. Or some packages are incredibly difficult to port, sometimes because of the weird build system. These are good reasons for some packages being in Cygwin in favor of other packages which are usually used on Linux. E. g., we have Exim and ssmtp but not sendmail and postfix. After all, also the users might be different in what tools they use. If our net distro is in any way similar to a Linux distro, I guess it would be Debian or, perhaps, Fedora. And then, two questions should be raised and discussed: - How is the distro process controlled in Debian and Fedora and can we inherit them? - What criteria are used to refuse or accept a package and can we inherit them? > I don't think that the current setup.exe is dumbed down. It just isn't > really feature-rich. That's true. I'm wondering mostly about stuff like, for instance, jumping immediately to the package selection, keeping all other settings, including the mirror. This would allow running w/o having to retrieve the mirror list from cygwin.com. Or no questions about desktop icon and start menu entry. However, it *would* be nice to have a rpm based system, wouldn't it? Corinna -- Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to Cygwin Developer mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Red Hat, Inc.