[...] You say a lot up there, just one thing: I understand your disappointment with the problems in the evolution package, but I think you picked a rather bad example there. I was reluctant to even put the package into unstable, and nearly didn't do it, wasn't it for various people that talked me into it. The thing is, a lot of people badly wanted it, so I put it up. I know that it has flaws, but it definitly is useable. And heck, you say you know what unstable is, so repeat that aloud several times to yourself :-) It's like testing in debian, it will contains broken packages! You gotta expect it. Not that we are not trying to avoid this and to fix it, but our resources are limited.
One more thing: my focus is definitly not on end users. My focus is first on me, and then on users. You may think this to be arrogant, but considering that I spend major amounts of my own spare time on this project, it's my good right. I will try to make this more user friendly whenever I can, but there are clear limits. >The bottom line is that, while I would never want a package that >wasn't available in source form, I don't have time to compile every >package I need and I certainly don't have time to babysit compiles >with broken dependency links. I want to be able to recommend this >platform to my many coworkers, but we're not quite there yet. >Please keep up the excellent work and make it easier for us non-Fink >developers to get you guys the feedback you need. Given the Mac's >emphasis on productivity, in my opinion, the ultimate goal of Fink >should be a bulletproof binary distribution, backed up by the power >of source. Sure, I would love that. Give me a DP-800 or faster machine, and pay me a salary, and I will do it immediatly. :-) Many people have asked why we can't just take the .deb other people build and use that for unstable. We could do that, yeah, but it would require various things: 1) Asking SF for permission to host 4-6 GB instead of the 2 GB they already endure. 2) The tool chain for maintaining a bindist must be updated to support bindist. It must be improved to allow easy use, and be made "fool proof" (because everybody, that includes me, makes mistakes and it's not so nice if that means messing up the bindist) 3) The people that are doing this must be trustworthy. That means, I must trust them to be careful (not messing up things in the bindist), security aware (they might not put trojans in their .debs, but how do I know there machines are not wide open to attacks because they enable root and telnet and their password is "foobar" ?). 4) We need a QA team that checks if this unstable bindist is actually usable, by trying to apt-get all the packages regulary, in various combinations (ideally, a dedicated machine with a test app that automates this). Otherwise we will just get as many complaints 5) more things I don't think of now. > You appear to be heading in that direction but with relatively >minor changes, you could be headed there faster. So pleas clearly name those "relatively minor changes" ! What you said so far was rather vague in terms of concrete suggestions, I think. Cheers, Max -- ----------------------------------------------- Max Horn Software Developer email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> phone: (+49) 6151-494890 _______________________________________________________________ Have big pipes? SourceForge.net is looking for download mirrors. We supply the hardware. You get the recognition. Email Us: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
