On Tue, Dec 09, 2008 at 09:41:41AM -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>> "RWMJ" == Richard W M Jones
<rjones(a)redhat.com> writes:
RWMJ> Everyone's happy with me to go ahead with this?
You have to torture reality pretty badly to assume that silence
somehow implies happiness. Maybe people are just annoyed to see this
come up again.
I was a bit surprised there was no response from the first email, and
the second email was an opportunity to bring this to peoples'
attention again. I haven't made any changes yet to the packages,
precisely because I wanted to hear what people had to say and ensure
there was general agreement first.
So here's one from someone who was never all that comfortable
with all
of this Windows support in the first place:
During the discussions you were somewhat adamant about the limited number
of Windows library packages that your proposal would entail. You
quoted numbers and relatively small size requirements as evidence that
this was no big deal.
This is still the case. Even with all the packages we've done, plus
the OCaml subpackages, the whole of mingw is under a gigabyte (src +
noarch RPMs). At the time we estimated 800 MB, so we have gone
slightly over our estimate, but at the same time we've expanded the
scope to include C++ libraries like gtkmm. Still, I wouldn't really
say that 1 GB is excessive.
We have found a non-virt co-maintainer (Levente Farkas) for all the
base packages too.
Now you're talking about taking what is
something of a niche package category (ocaml packages) and adding a
second level of niche-itude to them (windows cross-compilation
environment for ocaml packages) and I'm wondering if the overhead of
these packages was included in your initial figures and whether you
actually think that anyone other than you will actually use them.
Yes, people in the OCaml community are excited by this. That may not
be a community that is very visible to Fedora packagers I admit.
I mean, sure, if you're a packager and you can get someone to
review
your packages, you can basically turn Fedora into your own personal
distro, with the specialized packages that you want already in there.
I don't think that's a bad thing. Even better if other people happen
to benefit from those packages. At some point, however, someone needs
to actually think about how the cost of this compares to the benefits.
I do have a couple of other hands in the fray, though:
As a package reviewer, I think you've already dropped a metric ass-ton
of packages on the review queue and I shudder to think that you would
consider actually adding more without spending at least a solid month
helping us review packages. Avoiding having to review another pile of
whatever-for-windows packages would be great.
It's true that I have been negligent in doing very little review work.
So I will try to change that.
As a Packaging Committee member, I would want you to at least add
sufficient comments to these specfiles to discourage anyone who might
want to package an ocaml module from using them as examples unless
they somehow want to maintain them for Windows as well. After taht
long review process we have what I think are a good set of ocaml
package guidelines with nice templates, and now you're proposing to
take the bulk of those packages away from that.
OK, this is fair too. I usually encourage OCaml packagers to start
out with:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Image:Packaging_OCaml_ocaml-foolib.spec
linked from:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/OCaml
That doesn't currently include a mingw subpackage, and nor should it.
Note that there are currently 70 OCaml packages in Fedora, and only a
handful of those (10) were proposed to be cross-compiled, 2 of those
being the cross-compiler itself.
Rich.