I've been following the enormous thread "why there are so few packages in Factory" and then I picked up a bug in filezilla, installed from obs network repository, on the opensuse list. After seeing the part of the above thread about monetary contribution to maintainers, I had an idea. We already have a repository that serves this purpose, Packman. It seriously lacks build resources, I've often seen problems reported on the packman mailing list caused by the slow build time of updated packages. I assume this is due to a lack of server resources. I don't completely understand the legal side of all this and don't know if contributing server power opens one up to possible legal action. I've only recently started contributing to Packman with links to packages I maintain in openSUSE, I mostly maintain multimedia packages and some of them need gray area libraries to get full functionality but in the case of graphics/blender, not a multimedia package, it also enables users to get the latest version. It's a resource hungry build and I've even had to deal with out of memory build failures in Factory. I struggled to get it to build reliably for Packman's factory repo but now it builds quite happily and get's maintained in graphics so it's no extra work for me. The only extra care needed for a central repository, whatever it's name, is to make sure that any libraries provided to make the package build for lesser versions of openSUSE aren't provided for openSUSE versions that have them because very often the newer library has a slight change in api that causes a crash if it's not present, see https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=966384 or the package should specifically pull in the newer library if the package doesn't build without it. This needs initial extra work but once done, no more problems. There could even be an automated check based on the minimal version listed in the BuildRequires: in the spec file to prevent problems such as the one in the above bug. All this said, I am a poor struggling person and maintaining packages is an expensive but enjoyable hobby for me and the money I spend on mobile broadband every month could well go on something else, like new sparkplugs for my bike, so I most definitely get this off the ground by myself. There also needs to be a channel where new packages are requested because making the whole of Tumbleweed available for Leap:42.1 for instance would IMHO be a disaster. Maybe it's not a good idea to have every opensource package in existence in openSUSE but there are a lot of desirable packages that aren't in the distro. If I need a package that isn't in the distribution for something I generally google and then see if somebody else has built it in obs, I copy their package and make it up to standard and then I build it against my system and keep it in my local repo. So if somebody requests a package, I might even have one ready to submit. Regards Dave Plater -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org