Fwd: Octave?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 16:00:22 -0500, Gregory Maxwell wrote:

> On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:09:47 -0500, Chuck R. Anderson <cra at wpi.edu> wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 03:06:15PM -0500, seth vidal wrote:
> > >
> > > > Historically packages in extras have not been as well maintained...
> > >
> > > I'd love to see some proof of that. ANY proof of that, please.
> > 
> > Not to mention that Extras hasn't existed long enough for there to
> > really be a history...
> 
> Gah.  I should have careful with my words...   What I intended to
> convey is that packages included in the core distribution tend to be
> better maintained. This wasn't intended to be a specific slam against
> extras, and I'm disappointed that this one point from my post is
> drawing attention to the exclusion of the others.

Here you did it again. Generalisation, such as "packages included
in the core distribution tend to be better maintained", is bad.
First you should define how you measure quality of maintenance.
 
> The statement that in-core packages get more attention is pretty
> basic.. As a part of the core installation they get installed with a
> lot of other cruft along with an 'everything' installed and as a
> result they get a fair amount of casual 'whats this' use beyond the
> use that packages people must seek out and install by name get.

How many users perform "everything" installations and try only a small
fraction of the installed packages? How many users don't even install
Fedora Core Updates? How many report bugs if they don't have special
interest in the software? Compare that with users who are in search of a
small set of specific extra applications, e.g. in the freshmeat.net
directory, find them as recent rpms in Fedora Extras, and would not give
them a try if they had to build them from source code. With the
availability of ready-to-use packages in Fedora Extras and with their
interest in the software, they become dedicated users ("power-users"). And
it's these users who also report bugs or seek for communication with
upstream developers.

> As a
> part of the core distribution  build problems in such package can
> become roadblocks to scheduled releases where being in extras is more
> of a 'if it's there it's there', it changes the priority of a package.

In case of build problems or bugs, what makes you so sure that packages in
Fedora Extras don't gain special attention from their maintainers? Maybe
the maintainer of a package in FE is the author of the software? Maybe the
maintainer of a package in FE can focus on a single package, because
he/she only maintains a single package in FE?

-- 
Fedora Core release Rawhide (Rawhide) - Linux 2.6.11-1.1185_FC4
loadavg: 0.59 1.42 1.69

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