-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 houghi wrote:
On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 07:39:17PM +0200, Pascal Bleser wrote:
And as far as packagers are concerned, the difference is huge. Besides the Packman team, James Ogley's, 5 or 6 suser-* repositories on gwdg.de and mine... there's near nothing as 3rd party repositories for SUSE Linux. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure there's not much more to it.
Let's start a new thread here... (no, I'm not mistaken in the Subject with "openSUSE", it's about packagers in the openSUSE community, or rather the lack thereof)
The cause of this might be that SUSE always had an enourmous amount of programs already included in its distribution. Only lately the other distros are getting larger and larger as well.
I don't think so. I really don't.
Count the number of packages provided for Debian. Count the packages
available for Fedora (not within the ISOs, I mean everywhere). Have a
look at RPMforge. When you go to a download page of a FOSS project, what
packages do you see: Fedora, Debian, Mandrake, and rarely SUSE Linux
(and when you do, check the site, it's most probably Packman, James,
oc2pus or me).
Dunno why, seems SUSE Linux has never attracted a lot of packagers.
I must say that we've been left standing in the rain a little the past
years, but things are definately looking very good now, and with what
the SUSE staff is planning for the next months, it could very well be
even better than the other distros (no, I won't disclose anything, let's
wait for the concepts to be discussed and confirmed a bit ;)).
Although SUSE Linux ships a huge number of packages, there is still a
lot of stuff that's not included. And I really think that the core
distro should shrink a little (or at least stop growing) because at some
point, quantity would get over quality, and that's definately not what
any of us want. It's up to the openSUSE community to grow more packagers.
As an example, newest versions of many packages are not available for
SUSE, if it wasn't me, the Packman folks and James and a few other
people (in no particuliar order).
It's better to have a large number of packagers who have less work and
take care 110% about a small number of packagers than the opposite.
While I'm probably the most prolific community packager for SUSE Linux
(not as a site, Packman has a lot more, but as a single person), I don't
have the time to test every single one of them (actually, I only test
very few of 'em). I'd very much prefer to scale down to around 20-50
packages, follow them closely, apply patches as they arise, and test
them thouroughly. And eventually, get involved into other FOSS
activities. Maybe it's time for some "pass the torch" thing ;)
I really think that the most of us (as mentioned above) are very good
packagers with a lot of experience with SUSE Linux - we've been doing
this for quite some time - and we should try to find some volunteers
interested in the job and grow a packager community. At least I'm
willing to help, review, coach, whatever, as I'm sure others are. I
believe that we can get some SUSE staffers to give us a hand as well.
You, reading this mail: if you are interested, join
opensuse-packaging@opensuse.org, drop a mail and let's see what we can
achieve.
To me, that's the #1 priority for openSUSE (as a community), but I guess
everyone sees other #1 priorities ;))
(and that's good, it not only shows there's still work to do to leverage
our community (at least in numbers) but also that we actually have ideas
on how to do that)
cheers
- --
-o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
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