On Wednesday 02 February 2011 21:27:35 Greg Freemyer wrote:

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Jos Poortvliet wrote: <snip>

...

...

That reads as if you assume OBS is not successful. I feel the opposite.

Indeed. It is popular but could be more so ;-)

BTW we also need to do more in the area of USING those huge numbers. For marketing but also community building purposes. How could we get the tens of thousands who use OBS to contribute to openSUSE? After all, they're VERY close to openSUSE already - it's just pushing a few buttons to submit their packages to factory or request merges with existing packages to fix bugs.

I don't think it is necessarily that simple.

First, I _assume_ lots of those 100+K packages are the same package just in lots of repos.

For instance each of the main packages is probably in at least a devel package, factory, 11.3, 11.2, 11.1 discontinued. Admittedly, each of those may be at a different version level/patch level. But 100+K packages is a highly misleading number I suspect.

And then for lots of smaller packages, I don't think they are really built for distro use.

First, many don't have man pages for executables, which I think is required in the push to factory.

Another example is open2300. I packaged it because I use it, but it generates a dozen or so executables. All *2300 (open2300, log2300, etc.). I can't envision putting that in factory that way. The names really need to be changed to 2300* (2300open, 2300log, etc), but the upstream project is basically dead, so I don't see it happening there.

I may get it into the distro eventually, but for now I'm happy with it in a devel project. So OBS for open2300 is giving me exactly what I want. A way to publish a little known/used app without the more formal requirements appropriate to a full distro release.

Yeah, this scenario is what OBS really supports very well. But I think we should try and see how we can lower the barrier and/or motivate people to go that extra step towards real distro support... And/or make installation of software from OBS really, really easy on openSUSE. That means not letting ppl search for it on the website (where they have to choose 'look in home projects' by hand before they actually see everything) but having it in YaST or the application installer being developed or something like that...

Greg