(forking to ARC-discuss) On Mon, May 5, 2008 at 11:22 AM, James Carlson <james.d.carlson at sun.com> wrote:
> Alan DuBoff writes: > > On Mon, 5 May 2008, James Carlson wrote: > > > > > In this case, no extra repository would have helped. > > > > It would have helped me. As it is, I had to go out, get the sources, > > compile them and it didn't compile the first time straight out of the > > tarball, I had to try a few different options. > > How would you be more helped by an external repository that doesn't > have Alpine in it than an internal repository that doesn't have Alpine > in it? > I'll let Alan answer that definitively, of course, but I took it to mean had/were an external repository been available, an external contributor could have posted the built bits once they'd done the port and build. I don't think he was suggesting that the repository availability was a necessary precondition to the build, but rather for the availability. Regardless, this brings to my mind an issue. As there was already an ARC case open, there are a couple of cases that are possible. 1) An ARC case is brought for a FOSS item. It takes forever (or never?) to complete. 2) An ARC case is brought for a FOSS item and has Big Rules integration. It takes forever to complete. 3) A project is secretly started behind SWAN that intends to follow #1 or #2, but no announcement is made and no-one externally is aware of it. If future ARC policy indicates that it's not a Big Rules integration, the project team may not even intend to bring the project for ARC review. In either case, a consumer/contributor may not want to wait, or if #3, may not even know a project is already underway. They may want to do as Alan did, and port/build themselves. What do they do with the resulting package? What happens when any of the 3 previous cases complete (possibly creating duplicate packages with incompatible integration/ARC expectation levels)? How can we prevent duplicate efforts? As for the first two cases, theoretically I suppose, you contact the original submitters and check status. If the answer is "Real Soon Now", do you just have to wait, or can you say, I can port that FOSS in 2 notes and go ahead and put it in the unstable repo? For the 3rd case, I suppose you can simply announce your intention to port FOSS project Y on some list and if no one responds in a timely manner, proceed as the singular trailblazer and again, put it into unstable (or if intending Big Rules integration, see #1 or #2). I have heard mention of a big list of FOSS Wants. Is this published somewhere? If there is a big pipeline of FOSS stuff being targeted, shouldn't we be aligning that with the evolving ARC vs. FOSS integration effort? I know I've done a fair share of FOSS ports some years ago for my own personal pet projects (I even attempted, once, to try getting one of them into Blastwave and never followed through). I personally feel the barrier for publishing and then maintaining the port may be more challenging than the port itself -- especially if I had an "itch to scratch" and even went so far as to want to do Big Rules integration. What's the expectation for a "contributor" (grant or no) who wants to scratch an itch and then make it available for others via a Use-This-if-You-Dare repository? Mark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/arc-discuss/attachments/20080505/911fd17e/attachment.html>
