On 4-9-2012 11:11, Juha Manninen wrote: > On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 10:35 AM, Reinier Olislagers > <[email protected]> wrote: >> include links to packages maintained elsewhere (e.g. the >> synapse trunk svn) as there will be people/groups that want to maintain >> their own product totally</feature request>
> My idea also was to have links to packages maintained elsewhere. > However the stability of the repository would suffer. The linked > servers can have downtimes or can disappear. Copying a stable version > of those packages to the Lazarus repository would solve some > maintenance problems. > Yet, the repository surely needs a maintainer and co-operation with > the package authors. > Does anyone know how Perl (CPAN) and other similar systems do it. I > understand they have have copied the packages and mirror the server. > Some other repositories use links, eg. many Linux distributions. Sorry, no experience there. > There are many things involved. Many versions of the same package must > be supported etc. > It can grow into a very complex system which is not the goal now. :) Starting simple, finding out what works, and only then increasing scope is a concept that has worked well for me at least ;) Much better than writing up all possible use cases and getting lost in functionality that 1% of the users will ever want. If linked packages doesn't fit into the current ideas, no problem ;) If it turns out to be something that is desired later on, perhaps it can be added without too much trouble. > The GUI in Lazarus could allow searching and installing, but also > voting for the quality of the packages. If you support voting as well as provide some indication of where the package comes from (i.e. the main repo or a linked repo maintained by somebody else), I think having links is very valuable. Your idea of having a stable version of a package in the main Lazarus repo would solve reliability/availability issues, while external devs could ask their advanced users/people depending on newly released fixes to use linked packages... I think the big advantage of linked packages is that it much easier for devs to provide support for this - they presumably have to fill out some description file, zip/compress their package and provide a download link with the result... Not much hassle and no need to contact those poor, overworked, central repository guys ;) While the stability etc of this link cannot be guaranteed, as you see, it is still much better than the current situation: a user has to search through the wiki, and perhaps forum, to find where to download a package. At least a (central+linked) package system will be a very good incentive to provide one big central list of available packages. > There are many possibilities. Yep. I'd also prefer to have something small that just works and that we can experiment with now, and improve as we go along (as long as we're not afraid to reorganize things as long as it's in testing mode). -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
