Policy to accept new packages? (was: Re: [ITP] shellsupport-1.2.4-1)

[Christopher Faylor]

On Sun, Oct 17, 2004 at 04:23:31PM +0300, Jari Aalto+mail.linux wrote:
>I would more like to see...

Well, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it),
this isn't strictly a democracy.  It is more like a benign or (depending
how you look at it) mean co-dictatorship.

>I think to would encourage people more into contributing. A discussion
>about package's "merits" before it is included is rather a personal
>opinion and tend to favor the look of ivory tower, so to speak.

We are certainly not going to just include things in the distribution
and then argue the merits of so doing after the package has been
included.  That's crazy.

I do appreciate very much the fact that people are willing to spend time
porting a package to cygwin and are theoretically willing to support it
indefinitely.  That does not mean that I will stand by and watch the
official cygwin distribution fill up with every package able to get
three votes.  For one thing, the space on sourceware is not free and,
for another, every package adds potential traffic to the cygwin list.
If we are going to add traffic we might as well add it for well-known
packages rather than packages like "shellsupport" where the basic
principles of cygwin (provide a standard linux-like feel to windows) are
essentially subverted.

I keep suggesting this but maybe it is time to change the acceptance
behavior.  Some people here just seem to have their auto-reply set
to "+1" for every message which has an "ITP" in the subject.

Another suggestion:  Not every package that runs on linux is released
via debian, mandrake, or fedora.  There are plenty of packages out
there that are downloaded from individual web sites.  You can advertise
such packages at the cygwin web site by clicking on the links to add
new software to the list shown on the main cygwin page.

cgf