On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:15:57 -0700 Alan Coopersmith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> So you're recommending creating a contrib consolidation for these to
> be checked into and built from?

If he won't, I will. There are a number of reasons for this:

- Having a single "blessed" place that it's easy to add third party
  apps to will prevent people from feeling the need to run their own
  such repositories, which will eliminate a duplication of effort,
  storage waste on the client machines, and user frustration as they
  discover that you can't use foo from repo1 with bar from repo2
  because baf that they both depend on was built with different
  options in the two repos.

- It's probably not appropriate for it to be as easy to add things
  that are part of the core distribution as it is to add random third
  party applications.

- This lets you decouple the update cycle for this consolidation from
  the operating system. One of the most frustrating things about
  dealing with Linux is the all-or-nothing approach to updates. It's
  not uncommon to want to update one application to get a bug fix, but
  not want to update everything else at the same time. Yes, ON makes
  updating a system a lot saner than Linux - but that doesn't mean you
  want to do so just to get a bug fix for one application. This
  becomes obvious when dealing with large corporations who won't let
  you deploy systems that haven't been blessed by corporate
  IT/Security, so are generally a release behind the world, and won't
  let you touch "the system" without a great deal of pain and
  agony.(*)

- This means it may make sense for the consolidation to provide a more
  recent version of some application - say a beta version, or just one
  that hasn't been properly integrated back into the system and is
  important enough to want to do that carefully - at an alternative
  installation location.

  <mike

*) Yes, this implies that said consolidation will get rebuilt for "all
 supported builds" at regular intervals.

-- 
Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>          http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.

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