[OpenIndiana-discuss] How to help if you are not developer: Re: "OpenIndiana lead Alasdair Lumsden resigns"

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 12 Sep 2012, Milan Jurik wrote:
>>
>> It would be useful to build up a comparison matrix of top packages in
>> the Debian Popularity Contest (http://popcon.debian.org/) and compare
>> these packages to the ones that OpenIndiana currently offers to make
>> sure that OpenIndiana is not ignoring popular packages which might
>> easily compile and be useful on OpenIndiana.
>
> I would prefer to avoid such way. Sun internal people know how such
> thing ends... Packages should be added by people who need them and
> volunteer to maintain them. Otherwise system is full of popular packages
> which are not maintained.

I agree that adding new packages is not trivial and each package needs 
a maintainer.  However, it would be good to know about any 
commonly-installed portable packages in stable Linux distributions 
that OI is missing.  Knowledge of something missing does not mean that 
OI is prepared to accept it.  Many OI users are traditional Solaris 
users and might not also use Linux so they may not be aware of 
something useful which is missing.

My impression is that OI + SFE is doing pretty good with the selection 
of packages, but some packages in OI are in need of being updated and 
can be updated without any risk.  For example, I found an annoying bug 
in OI's emacs which made it somewhat unusable.  The issue is not 
specific to OI because emacs in Ubuntu 10.4 has the same bug and the 
bug is well known.  The SFE version of emacs is new enough to solve 
that bug.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/