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

[Paolo Marcheschi]

Hi

I think that first we need to speed up the process of publication of contributed software,
for example I have contributed 2 software (dcmtk, xmedcon)  to illumos in 2011, and after the approval and corrections they are not published yet.
In the mean time due to my work  I ported several other software , we use for daily job, but I'm doubtful whether to publish or not due to this very difficult process.

Paolo


On 09/12/12 09:32 PM, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> 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