[Mageia-dev] Cinnamon

[Colin Guthrie]

Hi,

[friendly request: please try and post in plain text to mailing lists -
makes it much easier when you're reading numerous different messages
every day to not have to adapt to the different styles]


Firstly thanks for your work.

'Twas brillig, and Joseph Wang at 26/11/12 13:38 did gyre and gimble:
> 
> 
>     There has already been zillions of discussions about this. We will not
>     have Cinnamon. We already have enough environments and not enough
>     maintainers. And it will cause troubles maintaining different versions.
> 
> 
> I volunteer to maintain cinnamon.  I've already ported it from fedora. 
> I did
> it because no one told me not to do it.

Unfortunately this has been discussed a few times in the past on this
list. Your mentor should maybe have highlighted this to you when you
discussed packaging cinnamon with them. They maybe missed these
discussions also however.

> 
>     Please try to follow this. An open source project does not mean anybody
>     can do whatever he wants. We must keep some kind of logic and stay
>     realistic given the resources we have at the moment.
> 
> 
> There's this thing about not pushing away resources that are being
> volunteered.

This is true, and there is no doubt that we need more resources, but in
this case it could cost more than it gains. We have had issues in the
past of the packages for these alternative DEs causing issues for the
core DEs due to the packages satisfying dep's required by the core packages.

So while you may have packaged Cinnamon and tested that *it* works, have
you tested it in a repository along with all the other packages we have,
installing e.g. a gnome install and double checking that none of the
cinnamon packages have been pulled in to satisfy deps (incorrectly)?

Perhaps you have, but the "resources" required to support a new DE is
not simply on the packaging. It's in the QA and it's in the testing of
the fallout to other installs when those packages simply exist in the
repos. This is what often takes the most resources.

There is a lot more to this than simply making a bunch of packages.

> I've packaged cinnamon because I want to install it on my own machine. I
> spent
> 10-12 hours a day taking orders from my boss, and working on community
> projects
> is the way that I relax.  If you want to use my work then that's great. 
> If it turns out
> that the X hours that I put into making cinnamon work on mageia is a
> waste, then
> I'll wipe mageia and install fedora or ubuntu or scientific linux or mint.
> 
> I have very little tolerance for politics or long winded discussions or
> strategy
> discussion.  I get enough of that in my day job.  I've just packaged
> cinnamon and
> nemo.  If someone says thank you, provides some suggestions for fixing
> things,
> and then takes it, I'll be happy.  If not, then I'll wipe my disk and
> work on another distro.
> 
> So what do you want me to do?

Well you've clearly put a lot of work into this. While we have decided
in the short term to not support cinnamon, this is not necessarily a
"forever" decision, however at this stage of the release, it's likely
one that will not be able to be reverted until post-mga3, and even then
there is no guarantee.

All of your work is in Subversion. I'm personally fine if they stay
there and are not svn rm'ed and you can continue to keep them up-to-date
as per your own uses should you wish.

If you are keen to push this through, then I'm afraid you likely will
have to get involved in discussions about it.


Also, if you really do wish to have this supported, then you should
likely keep on packaging and hopefully find some of the many
unmaintained packages to adopt and prove that you will be sticking
around for a while and not abandon maintenance in the future for
whatever reason.


Cheers

Col
-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
Open Source:
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  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/