Benjamin Reed wrote: > John Ridgway wrote: > > | Two of these were submitted on 2/16 and nothing has happened with > | respect to them. One was submitted on 2/16 and a comment made upon it > | on 2/24, which I responded to the same day; and the other was > | submitted on 11/28; with no response until 2/9. I understand that > | everybody involved with the project are probably busy; but it makes > | non-core maintainers like me doubt whether it's worth doing anything > | at all. > > Yeah, it's a no-win situation. We don't have time to review things and > groom non-core folks to get commit access, and things don't happen > because people don't have commit access. =) > > I'll take a look at them tonight. > > | I'm not even mentioning (well, obviously I am) the fact that I > | submitted packages system-texlive, tetex-texmf-texlive and tetex-base- > | texlive in September and the bare indication that > | 'The role within fink of "system" packages such as this one is > | currently under review by the fink core team.' I understand that this > | is a serious issue, but nothing is happening! The only version of TeX > | that is available with Fink is teTeX 3.0, which is getting seriously > | dated. > > Yeah. I think it's one of those things that when any of us who have > been around for a long time thinks about it, the brain just shuts down. > ~ There has been no end of trouble with tetex/texmf/etc stuff breaking > and changing incompatibly, and there were comments from the upstream > that they have no intention of providing any kind of guarantees on > functionality nor the locations of things when new versions come out (if > I recall correctly) so the whole thing left a very bad taste in > everyone's mouths. > > Honestly, since I *don't* use those things, I don't feel qualified to > have any opinion on the system-*tex* stuff, this is all based on what I > recall of IRC conversations, and I'm not sure if anyone else has the > expertise to say. Perhaps someone else can jump in. > > ~From my point of view, if we have someone who's willing to make sure it > *stays* compatible and work around potential upstream issues, I'm fine > with having it, but given it's history, it will need active > maintainership. > If the upstream folks have some kind of versioning or dating indicator that would at least allow a system-tex maintainer to check on that and have the package not install against a newer release--this would of course entail lots of nasty emails to the maintainer, but that's the price one pays. > | Also; it might be nice if somebody (I can't do it because I don't have > | the information) would post what the status of the Fink project is. > | Is anybody getting paid to do this, or is it all in people's spare > | time? Who is making the decisions? > > We all do it in our spare time. As a whole, we have things we want to > do, but have recently not had a lot of time to coordinate things. > > | I think that's enough venting for now. I'm sorry to trouble people, > | but I'm trying to help, and feel like I'm submitting stuff into a > | vacuum. > > Nah, it's understandable; Fink can chug along quite nicely without > infrastructure changes, but if it's hard for maintainers to get updates > out, it's bad for everyone. Alexander Hansen has, for the most part, > taken on the monumental task of helping folks who submit stuff to the > trackers, but I think most of us with commit access are in agreement > that the SF tracker *sucks* and try to avoid it if possible. > Yup. I should get my Mac back online next week. > Unfortunately, the aforementioned time issue makes it hard to come up > with something better than the trackers. :) > > Perhaps we should try to get a proposal out for Summer of Code and see > if someone wants to help us with some longstanding infrastructure work > we've needed to do. > > Anyways, it's not for lack of wanting, and we're certainly not *trying* > to have folks get frustrated. > > With regard to TeX, we seem to have vocal people who want a newer TeX distro but purport not to know what to do to implement it. We should make extra sure that changing from tetex is as painless as possible, to satisfy everybody.
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