On forming a SC [was Re: ITP moratorium still in effect?]

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Mar 28 17:24, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> I can't speak for Corinna, but I would rather *not* have to be the bad
> guy or a single (double?) point of contact.  I would rather have more
> community involvement.  I'm already drowning in being the focal point
> for most cygwin bugs with help from only two other developers.  I don't
> want to invent new things for me or Corinna to do, especially when there
> is no requirement for in-depth cygwin knowledge.

I second the idea of a community driven cygwin net distribution and I
would say that it's basically already the case.  It's just that the
appoval and review process is a bit... well, uncontrolled or unreliable.
Therefore to have a sort of a commitee, a bunch of people who feel
responsible for the net distro, would probably be a good idea.

However, I think Chris and I shouldn't be involved much in this
process at all.  I can't speak for Chris, but I told him once on the
phone, that from my point of view we are just maintainers for one
component of the net distro, the Cygwin package itself (ignoring for now
the other random packages which we maintain).

> Setting up a council or committee to approve or disprove apps means
> that the load is shared and there theoretically a consistent way for
> packages to be included.

With both of us not being member of the comittee, IMO.  A veto right
would be ok but it should only be excersised when absolutely necessary
(e. g. legal problems).

> >Another approach might be to ask: "Do the Linux vendors support it?". 
> 
> That is exactly an idea that I was going to propose.  I was waiting to
> see where the discussion was going first.  I was going to use actually
> veto ac-archive on this basis but then noticed that when I typed:
> 
>   up2date ac-archive
> 
> ac-archive got pulled into my fedora-based system.   So vetoing ac-archive
> because for this reason wouldn't work.

Hmm.  I don't like the idea.  We should really keep in mind that

1. All Linux distros are different
2. Cygwin is not Linux

Which distro of Linux will we use as role model?  Red Hat?  Fedora?  SuSE?
Debian?  Connectiva?  Which version?  What if a package is in, say, Debian
Woody but not in Red Hat 9?  And why should that be a rule?  Cygwin is not
Linux.  Cygwin doesn't support all function calls of a Linux system.  Also
some vanilla package maintainers ignore Windows based systems or even refuse
to make any patches to accomodate them.  Or some packages are incredibly
difficult to port, sometimes because of the weird build system.  These are
good reasons for some packages being in Cygwin in favor of other packages
which are usually used on Linux.  E. g., we have Exim and ssmtp but not
sendmail and postfix.  After all, also the users might be different in what
tools they use.

If our net distro is in any way similar to a Linux distro, I guess it
would be Debian or, perhaps, Fedora.  And then, two questions should be
raised and discussed:

- How is the distro process controlled in Debian and Fedora and
  can we inherit them?
- What criteria are used to refuse or accept a package and can we
  inherit them?

> I don't think that the current setup.exe is dumbed down.  It just isn't
> really feature-rich.

That's true.  I'm wondering mostly about stuff like, for instance,
jumping immediately to the package selection, keeping all other
settings, including the mirror.  This would allow running w/o having to
retrieve the mirror list from cygwin.com.  Or no questions about desktop
icon and start menu entry.

However, it *would* be nice to have a rpm based system, wouldn't it?


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                                mailto:cygwin@cygwin.com
Red Hat, Inc.