5k packages?

[Christopher Blizzard]

Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> Personally I think it would be a very bogus stat as one thing I have
> heard over and over again is that Fedora Extras is not to be a dumping
> ground. Quality is always important over quantity, and the people who
> make the biggest case for this have been burned in the past by other
> Cookers/Extras/etc. However, these are subjective like what is a good
> wine and hard to graph without making it a "My Flag is bigger than
> yours.." vs "Oh well my Flag has better values than yours" type
> debate.
> 

I don't think there's a dichotomy here.  It does measure at least one 
thing: a growing community of contributors.  Regarding your assertion of 
quality, to quote someone else "it's true: the long tail is full of 
crap" but your crap might be someone else's useful tool.  In this case, 
breadth is more important than depth.  If we were worried about depth, 
we would try to be the upstream for everything and that's not our stated 
or intended goal.

> The items I have heard over and over for Extras is that People who
> package up something should not just be someone who knows how to do
> some tar commands, but should be taking responsibility for the care
> and maintenance of the package. They should know the code well enough
> to be able to patch it or at least get a working patch from the
> maintainer on a problem.
> 

People have different skill sets.  That's true and we're not going to 
find a someone like Dave Jones is to the kernel for any particular 
package.  If something is critical, we staff for it.  If someone out 
there in the community is passionate about something or wants to own it 
and can measure up to our base packaging and maintenance guidelines, we 
let them get in the driver's seat.  This is about community building and 
building our breadth, not being perfect every single time.

--Chris