[OpenIndiana-discuss] IPS pkg popularity contests

[Rthoreau]

Dear: fellow OpenIndiana users developers;

After installing a lot of programs not listed in the repositories, such
as msmtp, aspell, hunspell, and trying to get a basic desktop
environment.  I was wondering how Illumos, and OpenIndiana are going to
handle the every increasing packages that people will want to include or
have included into the release cycle.  Which brings up the desire for
some kind of popularity contest, which would give priority to the most
used packages and could cut down on the ability and security
vulnerabilities of those packages.

I could see that OpenIndiana could end up in a situation such as Debian
where every release has more and more packages without maintainers but
packaged to scratch a need then left in the repositories until someone
comes along and claims the package, or it gets dropped due to
inactivity.

It would also be nice for new users to have some good documentation on
popular packages not in the repositories.  Hanging out in the IRC
channel and following some of the lists it might save a lot of people
some headaches if we had a wiki page on common packages that people
might want.  This might include such things as the KDE repositories, and
those for mplayer and the codecs for those not using the Fluendo
codecs. Like how to compile lame, and other basic desktop packages that
might not be included due to restrictions and license issues.

I ran into this problem as I tried an article on the sun observatory
about how to compile mplayer which failed to compile.  Then in the irc
channel I found that someone had already had a repository with the
included package.  The same goes for kde, just following the lists it
seems that a few posts describe the repository and a few directions on
getting it to work.

As we all know that documentation can make or break a project and can be
a point of keeping people interested. That is one reason why the BSD's
has done so well over the years the documentation has been very good and
usually works between releases. My concern right now is to see if we can
get a general consensus on the proper method to make an outstanding
resource for users and developers.

Rthoreau