On Nov 23, 2020, at 20:30, Fernando Della Torre <[email protected]> wrote:

> I know it's easy to say and hard to do, but surely Rivendell would have a 
> larger visibility if it were packed in 2 or more flavors, like RPM and DEB 
> pointing to all dependencies it needs and ready for the modern distros, 
> whether Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Fedora, Centos 8, etc. Every time in the past I 
> had to complite from source and every update was a kind of a pain.

Point taken. However, every one of those distributions have their own unique 
‘style’ (package manager, distribution channel, desktop, support philosophy, 
process management, etc, etc). I’ve concentrated on making Rivendell work 
easily on RHEL/CentOS not out of any sense that other distros are “bad”, but 
because of a simple, brutal fact of time management: the time I spend fiddling 
with distro compatibility is time *not* spent working on and improving the core 
Rivendell system. So, I’ve picked one distro (RHEL/CentOS, more-or-less at 
random) to be the ‘reference platform’ for Rivendell.

This is actually a trope in the wider Linux software ecosystem. It is common 
for large applications there to have two layers of ‘developers’; a core group 
(often referred to as ‘upstream’) that does the primary application 
development, and a distribution group (aka ‘downstream’) that takes the source 
code output from upstream and turns it into installable packages for particular 
platforms (distros). So for example, using the above terminology, I am one of 
the 'upstream developers' for Rivendell; I am also the ‘downstream maintainer' 
for Rivendell's RHEL/CentOS integration. Rivendell has historically had other 
downstream maintainers for other distros —e.g. the Tryphon group that for many 
years maintained a very solid Debian integration. Unfortunately, when the 
Tryphon group disbanded a few years ago, support for that integration 
evaporated.

I would welcome others coming aboard as downstream maintainers for their distro 
of choice. To be a downstream maintainer does not require extensive programming 
ability. What it does need is reasonable system administration skills, 
familiarity with building software from source code, and above all a good 
knowledge of the target platform's software packaging and distribution system. 
I will gladly:

1) Accept PRs from downstream maintainers aimed at making Rivendell work better 
on their platform of choice, and work with their authors to get them accepted 
into the standard Rivendell releases.

2) Provide space on servers in the ‘rivendellaudio.org’ domain for hosting 
packages, documentation and other materials for supporting Rivendell on their 
platform of choice.

Anyone up for the challenge?

Cheers!


|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |             Chief Developer             |
|                           |             Paravel Systems             |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
|  ... indifference is a militant thing ... when it goes away it      |
|  leaves smoking ruins, where lie citizens bayonetted through the    |
|  throat. It is not a children's pastime like mere highway robbery.  |
|                                                                     |
|                                                  -- Stephen Crane   |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|

_______________________________________________
Rivendell-dev mailing list
[email protected]
http://caspian.paravelsystems.com/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev

Reply via email to