Hi, On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 17:44:34 +0200, Johannes Winkelmann wrote:
Hi,
On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 10:43:50 +0300, Mikhail Kolesnik wrote:
Hi. [...] The problem: an average CRUX contributor can't just put a port depending on something from gnome/kde/xfce (DE) into contrib, nor can he put it into the specific DE repository.
It makes many ports hard to find/update/trust. Some ports will die inside private repos, as not many users like to subscribe to those (and play with prt-get.conf to build their personal dependency strategy).
While I admit CRUX is DIY distro without a strict policy for everything... the status and possible usage scenarios (tips) of DE repositories looks unintuitive. I'm not using any of the three DE's with a dedicated repository, so I may not know the typical problems here, plus to me there are some questions (see below) which make it hard to judge the different variants.
That said, if I'm looking for a KDE specific app, and there's a dedicated KDE repository, I'd expect it to be there. I'm not sure if any other solution can be considered more intuitive.
Just adding some notes here, following up a discussion from IRC: Here's a rather radical idea: what would happen if we merged the collections on the client side, i.e. opt+xorg+xfce (all committer to xorg and xfce also have commit access to opt) would be merged together, and contrib+gnome (+kde if Alan joined contrib). Of course, other combinations are possible too (i.e. all the three together with opt, or all the three with contrib). Remember that in the past, we had all of it in opt too, and I couldn't remember any complaints about this. This would mean the following: - dependency situation is clear: contrib can depend on all ports that are in the "contrib meta collection" - repositories can still be developed independently - intuitive to the user: low numbers of repositories At the same time, there's an obvious drawback: the user would have to sync all more repositories which she potentially doesn't need. I believe this is only a psychological problem, since users of source based distributions are expected to have both enough bandwidth and diskspace anyway. However we could offer a way for those users that care to disable the repositories (opt-out), i.e. those that are worried about bandwidth could disable the repos they don't want, but will have to expect missing dependencies. Just adding this here as an idea so that others can comment, I haven't really had the time to think it fully through and I'm _not_ proposing this as _the_ solution but just as one possibility that could also be evaluated. Finally, note that there's the same problem we had with the former contrib setup: there may be duplicate ports, and they will have to be dealt with. Regards Johannes -- Johannes Winkelmann mailto:jw@smts.ch Zurich, Switzerland http://jw.smts.ch