Dear: fellow OpenIndiana users developers; After installing a lot of programs not listed in the repositories, such as msmtp, aspell, hunspell, and trying to get a basic desktop environment. I was wondering how Illumos, and OpenIndiana are going to handle the every increasing packages that people will want to include or have included into the release cycle. Which brings up the desire for some kind of popularity contest, which would give priority to the most used packages and could cut down on the ability and security vulnerabilities of those packages.
I could see that OpenIndiana could end up in a situation such as Debian where every release has more and more packages without maintainers but packaged to scratch a need then left in the repositories until someone comes along and claims the package, or it gets dropped due to inactivity. It would also be nice for new users to have some good documentation on popular packages not in the repositories. Hanging out in the IRC channel and following some of the lists it might save a lot of people some headaches if we had a wiki page on common packages that people might want. This might include such things as the KDE repositories, and those for mplayer and the codecs for those not using the Fluendo codecs. Like how to compile lame, and other basic desktop packages that might not be included due to restrictions and license issues. I ran into this problem as I tried an article on the sun observatory about how to compile mplayer which failed to compile. Then in the irc channel I found that someone had already had a repository with the included package. The same goes for kde, just following the lists it seems that a few posts describe the repository and a few directions on getting it to work. As we all know that documentation can make or break a project and can be a point of keeping people interested. That is one reason why the BSD's has done so well over the years the documentation has been very good and usually works between releases. My concern right now is to see if we can get a general consensus on the proper method to make an outstanding resource for users and developers. Rthoreau _______________________________________________ OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
