[...] > Whether it's a vendor or a community site, I want to > know if I can trust the > software to do what one might reasonably expect that > particular FOSS to do, > and to continue to do so after an OS upgrade. > > "This worked for me, if it works for you too, that's > cool" is too weak, IMO; it > depends totally on both the skill and integrity of > the packager, with no checks > and balances whatsoever. > > But whatever the repository standards (or lack > thereof), full disclosure is > critical; and the less detailed their standards and > processes, IMO the more > important their build recipes and procedures are > available, so that anyone > can replicate them to do their own troubleshooting or > maintenance.
P.S. It's fine to have more packages in a repository somewhere, but without _some_ quality assurance to them (and independent of the repository, for any given distro, its own standards choosing zero, one or a very small number among more or less duplicate apps to be in the base distro, hopefully with a greater degree of consistency among them than random aggregation), it doesn't mean much, IMO. Merely being able to say that we have nearly as many (or more) packages than (insert Linux distro here) says very little, without comparing the quality of the actual builds. Even zero attention span instant gratification click-monkeys probably want the darn thing to _work_ once they download it, and not to arbitrarily break on some future OS upgrade, nor to break anything else on their system. And that matters, especially when there are plenty of lower-brainer OS choices available, because unless they've already had a _lot_ of good experiences with us, the first bad one they have, they probably won't come back. IMO not having a package is a small bad, having it but having it stink (esp. if they realize it doesn't have to) is a bigger one. None of this means I'm a fan of bureaucracy; but I _am_ a fan of _standards_. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
