Hi, Something has been troubling me for a while and I was a bit confused about things. But now, I can finally put my finger on where from my perspective things break down. This might turn out to be a bit of a lengthy message; thus, please bear with me. I followed a relatively recent and very lengthy discussion thread that started out on a specific topic and eventually hit on the build service, philosophical discussions about other distributions and our lack of packages in contrib etc. (the thread was not on an openSUSE list :( ). At some point, the discussion also hit the height of the entry barrier for contributions. While in general I have to agree, the barrier for openSUSE package contribution is pretty low, it just dawned on me today where things are amiss, at least from my perspective. Let me try and use an example to illustrate the problem I think exists. A while back I packaged perl-critic and it's dependencies, starting out in my home project to make sure all is well and then I submitted everything to devel:languages:perl. From there I figured the packages would eventually find their way into the distribution automagically, or at the vary least into contrib. Well, that didn't happen. Based on a mail on the packaging list I guess what I need to do to get things into the distribution is to have another sr for the packages to the openSUSE:Factory project. But, that I cannot do as I am not a maintainer of devel:languages:perl. Now, I'd have to get added as a maintainer in that project and then do an sr for perl-critic and dependencies. Then rinse and repeat for any packages I might submit to other top level projects. Generally this is not really that bad, but it involves extra steps that are not necessarily obvious, and IMHO there is a disconnect. In my mind, when I submitted the packages to devel:languages:perl I was done. done meaning, I made a contribution to openSUSE, and the packages will be available to users that just configure "standard" repositories. What was left to do was to check back every few month and see if the packages needed a version bump. There was no indication that I needed to take a second, third, and forth step to make the packages available outside the devel project. This might be evident (or buried) in some wiki page, but I do not recall reading it, and looking for this type of info recently yielded nothing. Therefore, I claim that if it happened to me it will happen to other people. The possible result being that they might walk away and be lost as contributors. While I can understand that we might not want to pull everything that lurks in a devel project into the "standard" distribution I think we should strongly consider putting all those packages automagically into contrib. Here is how I think this might work. When a release is being created, first beta time frame I'd say, scan all the packages that are in devel projects or other projects that are not home: and check if the package builds for the targeted distribution (openSUSE 11.3 or Factory etc.). If the build succeeds and the package is not part of the "standard" distribution, then put the package into contrib automatically. The advantage of this is that a contributor that stops at step 2, i.e. gets the packages out of his/her home project and into a higher level project such as devel:languages:XXX or virtualization will be able to see/use the packages as part of the extended distribution (base repo + contrb). In addition, users can access the packages without having to add moving targets, i.e. devel projects, as update repositories to their systems. Last but not least this automatic collection will bolster the number of packages available through "standard" repositories and thus will bolster openSUSE. Also something the marketing team will be able to exploit ;) . Contributors that want packages in the "base" repo will still need to take the extra steps. A bit easier to find or more obvious documentation might be helpful there. The short summary/request is: Collect all packages that successfully built for a given distribution that reside in projects outside of home: and stick them into contrib: One of the gory details would be to skip packages in projects like "bleeding-edge" during the automatic collection. But I beleive there is already a flag for things like that already, if I recall a discussion on this list correctly. Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU Software Engineer Consultant LINUX rschweikert@novell.com 781-464-8147 Novell Making IT Work As One -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+help@opensuse.org