Apples and oranges (Was: Re: FC2 Wishlist Items)

[Eric S. Raymond]

Miloslav Trmac <mitr at volny.cz>:
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 08:15:01AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> > Obviously.  There are going to need to be humans watching the incoming queue
> > for problems and conflicts.  But freshmeat.net demonstates that it is 
> > possible to combine a scriptable submission procedure with human oversight.
> Apples and oranges. You can't break half of the distribution by
> putting a package announcement on freshmeat.

OK, how about cAos?

Their model (apparently) is: you drop an SRPM in an `untrusted' repository.
They QA stuff out of that pool into the equivalent of Fedora Core.  In much the
same way that freshmeat.net editors QA project announcements, which is why the
analogy is *not* apples and oranges.

A system like this is neither technically nor politically complicated.  All
it takes is enough imagination to see that frictionless submission tools 
like fedora-submit, shipper, and the soon-to-go-public bugzilla-submit are
useful things, and that their existence is *orthogonal* to whatever QA policy
a repository has.

That degree of imagination is certainly present at cAos and
freshmeat.net and the bugzilla project, all of whom are actively
cooperating with my efforts to reduce the hassle factor in shipping
releases.  I find it disappointing that such imagination seems to be
in shorter supply here.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>