On 23.03.2022 16:30, Martin Wilck wrote:
On Wed, 2022-03-23 at 12:32 +0100, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Hey,
On 23.03.22 11:59, Simon Lees wrote:
So maybe we really need to find a new group of users that use software.o.o
You don't have to be sick to be a Doctor...
and are also interested in web development as always how we do that is the much harder question.
Attracting new contributors is the *first* and *foremost* duty of the openSUSE project. For the distribution, the project *AND* for the infrastructure. We *have* to have an answer for this question.
If we continue to neglect this, openSUSE is going to go the way of the Dodo. Faster than you can say "preinstalled operating system" 3 times in a row.
Right, but Simon's point is valid. Contributors won't be attracted by having to code an UI that they're unlikely to need / use themselves. It's not the sexiest possible project either, because dozens of similar frameworks exist already, just not targeted at OBS as backend.
Moreover, casual contributors would most probably fail at this project. The basic technical part - connecting to the OBS API - is simple enough. But the difficult part - the one at which software.o.o is currently failing [*] - is to figure out which repositories matter for which distribution, a task that sometimes confuses even long time human openSUSE users. I'm not even sure if this could be reliably figured out from OBS in software without a hard-coded and ever-growing list of exceptions and special cases.
When I tried to raise this concern with OBS maintainers the response was - not our problem. OBS stays for Open *Build* Service, this is not the tool to build distribution, we do not care what you are doing with packages that we build.
It is possible to dynamically build list of inherited repositories by (recursively) following <link ...> elements. What is not clear - how to resolve ties between these repositories (i.e. if package is present in several of them). Is it done by OBS itself? Is there any side band tool and configuration to select which packages are part of distribution?
Even less clear is the situation with updates. They are "imported" into openSUSE by some undocumented black magic. Somehow they end in different paths on download server and I have no idea whether these paths are present in any (publicly available) metadata.
And of course relation between distribution and "third-party" repositories is pure ad-hoc. We assume that is repository contains "Leap_15.3" string it is for Leap 15.3 but that is pure convention not formalized or enforced.
IMO SUSE as openSUSE's sponsor should push this forward somehow. This is not a project to try to attract contributors for, it's a feature that must work in order to attract contributors for other tasks.
Martin
[*] As we know, s.o.o fails almost consistently for Leap 15.3.