Clemens Koller wrote:
Hello, Richard!
Richard Pöttler schrieb:
Am 10.12.2009 21:25, schrieb Clemens Koller:
What about adding something like prt-get --push <portname> that a newly created / updated port will be published to some mailing list for review and inclusion into i.e. contrib?
You think about something like git-format-patch and git-send-email? ;)
Yes, for example. It seems like a very good idea to use git. But how many users are using git and push their changes nowadays? Why isn't this part of the default setup?
I take care of my own (maybe five to ten) ports which get an update every once in a while. I think adding my repo to the already 50 others doesn't make sense since I don't see any advantage to have even more repos and more different versions to choose from (not knowing versions without checking it manually).
I think it would be much better to centralise the repositories to get opt and contrib more up-to-date instead of everybody is doing his/her own thing. What do you think?
Somehow I don't get, how you came to the conclusion, that you want to centralize all ports, but don't think, that it is worth to publish your own ports.
I think that a problem is that (duplicated) ports are scattered among many repos and it's hard to find out which one is the most current and which one is most likely to work for a quick and dirty update - increasing the version number, adjusting the Pkgfile a bit, check footprint and ... ?
In my point of view, something is missing in the default CRUX way: Feedback to one _central_ place.
I think the point is to get feedback, doesn't really matter if it's centrilzed or not. There are lot of ways to talk with maintainers, email adresses, irc and of course the bugtracker.
Imho it is pretty simple to become a conrtib maintainer to make your ports available for everyone.
If it's so simple, can it become a default for everyone? A simple way to push changes to i.e. contrib (via a list and via review by some list members) would imo motivate more people to contribute.
This could focus development more to one 'upstream' repository and avoid more diversification of the ports.
Duplicated ports in personal repositories I think are used to specify personal options to a port. The "official" repositories must fill the basic options, and I think that's the reason why there are lot of duplicates. When the only difference between official ports and personal ports is a version bump, then there is a lack of comunication (exists the possibility about a security reason too, or may be dependencies with other ports with a unique version) but the way to go must be to talk with maintainer's port and advice about a new version.
The problem I see in putting everything in contrib is that _everyone_ then puts his port into it and therefore (if someone puts a port there and forgets about them) ports can get unmaintained pretty soon. You could work arround this, if you say, that everyone is "allowed" to update everyone's port in conrtib. But as a developer I know, that you can pretty easyly offend other developers, if you touch their code, so this could be some kind of contraproductive.
There need be an instance to review these changes - a list.
A clearly visible version and timestamp could make it very clear which port is old an could benefit from an update.
Example: I need to update qt4 because I want to find out if the newest qtcreator can be used for sw development for a project. That is: qt-4.6.0 and qtcreator-1.3.0
What do you do? Search the portdb for 'qt'... You will get some hits: 3x qt4, qt-creator and qtcreator from different collections. (Some work was done more than once.)
Now, you need to find and decide which qt thing is good for you. Here, the mess starts:
You can verify if the port exists in an official repo and talk directly to the maintainer. Your point can be discussed and reasoned. I think the best way to maintain a port is to let it to one person, and this doesn't mean that a port update can't be talked. We finish in the same point, communication between maintainers and users.
You cannot check all the Pkgfiles in one place. -> :-( You have to check the Pkgfiles manually to find out which version can be preferrably used for an update. -> :-( You have to clone the whole collection if it's using rsync just to be able to find out the version of one port... -> :-( You can get the port when using rsync, there is a command in the portdb to get only the port instead of getting the entire collection.
Something like timestamps don't really exist.
I hope you got what I try to suggest you.
Best regards,
regards, Victor.
Clemens