Fedora Extras, Fedora Core CVS Open!

[Cristian Gafton]

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, Michael Tiemann wrote:

>> Only fork SPEC files when the complexity of maintaining them becomes
>> harder than the complexity of keeping things synchronised.
>>
>> My estimate is that for 70% of the cases 1 SPEC file can rule them all.
>
> That would be _extremely_ cool.

There is more to maintaining packages that how cool you can make your 
specfiles... We can play the coolness game, we can even have some sort of 
competition for the coolest, wicked packaging job ever. But that won't do 
a bit to help maintain those packages over the long haul, or by a team of 
people with different coding styles and appetites for coolness.

When you ask the question of "how do you improve maintainability", this 
turns, unfortunately, into a game of lowest common denominator. The 
"_extremely_ cool" hack from somebody looks like a retarded spewage to 
somebody else. That's the advantage of a one man repository - there is one 
person deciding what's cool and what's not. When a team of folks from 
across all continents are involved, avoiding being cute works much better.

That should not stop us from attempting to raise the bar on the skillset 
required to be a package maintainer; it's just that we have to be careful 
where we place the "coolness fastor" on the list of goals.

Cristian
-- 
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Cristian Gafton     --     gafton at redhat.com      --     Red Hat, Inc.
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"Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT
industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software
industry sector."
     -- Kenneth Brown, President, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution