In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Kevin Horton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At 18:51 -0800 26/1/04, Matthias Neeracher wrote: > >Could you explain in what way NOT allowing .app bundle > >packages enriches fink currently? > > > >If native KDE runs everything that KDE/X11 does and looks good, then > >I see no inherent value in KDE/X11, but as long as people are > >interested in the latter, the KDE/X11 package will find maintainers. > > Finding maintainers is only the first challenge. The second > challenge is getting someone to look at the package after it has been > submitter to the package tracker. There are already 110 packages > that have been submitted and are waiting for fink developers to > review. Some of them have been there since May 2003 and have yet to > even get a comment from a developer.
I just had a peek over there, and there are indeed a small number of packages that don't seem to be getting acted upon at all (The oldest of them seems to be xkbsw). The vast majority, however, did get comments and are mostly awaiting revisions by the original submitters. Also, in light of the fact that around 1000 packages submission HAVE already been incorporated from the tracker, 100 open packages don't seem an unreasonable number to me..
Furthermore, while I can understand the frustration of package submitters without CVS access, I don't think this issue is really related to whether we should be packaging .apps:
- CVS access for package commits is not a bottleneck, i.e. there are no exponentially growing communication problems between package committers, so we can always promote more people to have commit rights.
- To the extent that packages are not getting addressed, it's not really because all available committers are busy wrapping .app's, it's because they don't know enough about the packages. I can only speak for myself, but my criteria for looking at a submitted package include that I have a sufficiently good idea what it's supposed to do that I'd know after installing it whether it works correctly. Most packages currently on the tracker don't fit this criterion. This problem is compounded by some of the submissions not being very descriptive: It would be very helpful if titles included a hint what the package does, rather than just the title.
> Clearly there are more packages being submitted than there are > resources interested in reviewing them. This effectively means that > the people who are reviewing and approving the packages have to make > some priority decisions on which packages they should work on.
I don't really think so. Obviously, this is for the people who actually commit lots of tracker packages to comment on, not me, but I think the problem is more lack of interest in the packages being submitted than lack of time to look at the packages.
> Or perhaps the right answer is to simply say that the Fink team > cannot attempt to package every possible application, and that > resources will be focused on those packages that are seen as more > important.
Fink is an open source project. To the extent that resources are "focused", it's on packages that are interesting to somebody, not on packages that fit with our 50 year strategic vision. The great thing about fink is that it includes an enormous variety of very specialized packages. The drawback of that is that some packages are so specialized that none of the current committers can really relate to them.
> Then people like me could stop submitting minor packages > that may never get reviewed and simply post the .info files on a web > page for people to download themselves.
Under what login did you submit packages and what packages of yours have gone unreviewed for an extended amount of time?
Matthias
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