Hi, I've wanted to put this to discussion for quite some time, but never got around to writing this mail. Here it comes:
By now a nice number of people is producing binary packages of the rkward releases for various distributions and architectures. That is a wonderful thing, and I really appreciate this work. At the same time I don't quite know what to do with those packages. Several of you have offered to put them up on the web somewhere, or suggested for me to put them in the download list, or in general asked me, where to announce these packages. I'm afraid, I've probably left a good number of such mails unanswered - simply because I didn't really know myself. The issues is: I have the hint of a bad feeling about distributing contributed binaries. With some of the packagers I've been in contact for a long time, and some I've even met in real life. Others are completely unknown to me. Some packages are for standard distributions, some are backports for older distributions, some for updated versions of R, etc. Every once in a while, two people have created two packages for the same distribution, and I have no idea, which is better. It seems to me that somewhere I should draw a line between more "official" packages that I feel comfortable distributing, and supporting, and "other" packages that I don't really know too much about. In want of a better criterion, so far that meant, I uploaded the packages that I created myself, but no others. At the same time, that approach seems a bit disrespectful to the hard work of the packagers. And of course, it does not really help users in search of a binary for their distribution / architecture. So how to handle this? 1) Upload all contributed packages to the sourceforge download page. In case this is your favorite, there's a catch, though: I'd like to delegate most of the work to another person. Making file-releases is a cumbersome process, already, and I don't want it to take up yet more of my time. Volunteers? 1b) Upload to a regular directory on an HTTP-server (like http://rkward.sf.net/temp/). Possibly slightly easier to handle, but still I'd like to delegate that task. 2) Have most packages hosted somewhere else, and simply keep a list of links to those packages. Somewhat similar to http://rkward.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?title=Binaries_and_Build_Scripts (or http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/rkward/index.php?title=Binaries_and_Build_Scripts in the new wiki). However, we'd probably re-organize this page a bit, and try to make it more prominent (by advertising it as the primary download page). 3) Something else? What do you - and especially the packagers - think? Regards Thomas
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