On Freitag, Juni 27, 2003, at 06:08 Uhr, Mr. Kiwi wrote:
I haven't done much development for Fink in recent months, so I've been a little out of the loop. I came back wishing to mess around again (since I now have some time) but to my surprise, the Fink project seems to be in disarray. Here are a few issues I think need to be addressed before they get out of hand:I am very happy that you chose to come back and help out then. I am also glad that you are willing to address issues you seem to have with our Software Distribution and the fink package manager itself.
Consolidation:
Yes, getting Gentoo and all the other groups working with Fink was a good idea, but so far it has been poorly executed. There's no organization for the new influx of developers, which makes forums like this almost useless as well as the package tracker, etc. We need a darned "spring cleaning" of the entire site because the community environment is getting screwy.
Metapkg,org has been announced before WWDC because that is something Apple said inofficially they would be fond off. Futhermore the timing had been chosen to not let this slip beneath the stream of news from WWDC but to have the news picked up before WWDC. Traditionally even the non Mac World looks toward the Mac world shortly before WWDC. That there is not real infrastructure is something everyone is well aware. But fink-devel really is not the place to address metapkg issues, you might want to discuss that on their mailing list.
Ben & Ben, you two are the big men on site, make some executive orders and get stuff fixed.Unfortunately there are no "executives" with Fink. We can be happy that Max, Dave and Benjamin choose to be the ones taking on the responsibility of managing some of the more difficult decisions for Fink, yet in the long run even they rely on us, the community.
I'd even be willing to do some website work on the fink homepage, considering it gets stranger and more confusing by the day.Since this is a major issue and we do not wish to confuse our users, could you please elaborate where it is confusing and how we might go about fixing it?
I know PHP and Perl :Dgood.
I have never seen this problem. Furthermore the CVS server itself is out of our scope. Sourceforge is sponsoring this ressource and we are happy to use it. Should there be a permission problem within our CVS tree then that is something which indeed needs to be addressed.Reliability: //start # fink selfupdate-cvs sudo /sw/bin/fink/ selfupdate-cvs
Gonna try the cvs server...
su mkiwi login -p:serv...hahahahahahhahhahahahaha you don't have permission to access me!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The cvs server has had incorrect permissions for weeks now, and people are starting to complain. Whoever maintains it needs to fix it already, and fast.
//end
Target Markets:We have already adopted FinkCommander as an "official" Frontend to fink (the package manager therefore I am writing fink uncapped). The Author is very helpful and thus I do not believe that we should have any reason to change that. Adding access to configuration files and the like is something which can surely be added to FinkCommander. If you are interested in helping the author out, please do contact him.
A novice user running Fink Commander doesn't know if or why their packages aren't updating. Regular Mac OS X users should be your demographic target, but icky *nix problems get in the way. Maybe it's time to have a Fink Application written with Quartz API's to come along and save the day. With umpteen hundred packages floating around, users need easy access to config settings and other "geeky" parts.
Speed:Perl is the absolute fastest way to process text. You will find now more advanced, versatile and better Interpreter when it comes to handling Data Structures and munging text. That is well known in any "unixy" community, thus perl is not our problem. Unfortunately we are using a technique which is now getting slower. There have been numerous talks about it that we should no longer use "Storable" as it is getting slower by the packet we add. Someone had started work on a BDB backend but he stopped and never released the patches. If you know Perl well and would like to help out, then converting our Storable storage to a BDB storage would be something very helpful to us and the community.
Plus, unless you have a PowerMac G5, the Perl scripts are getting too slow to be efficient anymore. They were fine when we just had 400 packages to deal with, but we really need a solid, database-driven command-line option OTHER than Debian. Remember, Debian is for Linux, Fink is for Mac OS X. Reading a bunch of files in a tree is slow (and kinda newbish) work, something not characterized by our community. Maybe it's time to use the XML packages and gcc's libraries to do the dirty work that Perl has trouble with.
<snip>
Spend some time thinking about how Fink could be better... that's all I'm really asking anyway.I can assure you that this happens everyday. I guess that Benjamins efforts concerning prebinding reflect this. I hope that I have respectfully addressed most of your concerns. As you might be able to tell, we do care about the many interesting thoughts Users and Developers have and I am sure that they will be addressed further.
-d
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GCC d+ s: a-- C+ UB++++ P+ L++ E--- W N+ o+++ K w-- O M+ V++ PS PE Y++ PGP++++ t+ 5 X- R+ tv-- b++++ DI D+ G e++++ h+ r++ y++ ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
PGP.sig
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
