Avi Bryant <avi at beta4.com> wrote:
[SNIP]
> Yesterday, in the context of talking about where Monticello needs to 
> go, Julian and I were discussing exactly this: how do we make it easier 
> for the community to be involved in external packages (for example, 
> there isn't much in the way of process right now to submit fixes to 
> Seaside and so on).  What we were trying to imagine was something very 
> like BFAV, but structured by package rather than as a single flat list. 

Just so you know - I have talked to Brent etc and AFAIK he wants to make
BFAV "package aware".
I haven't thought about it myself so I have no exact idea of how.

>  I also mentioned this possibility to Ken Causey a few days ago.  There 
> are two things that I think are crucial for such a facility: one is 
> that it should make the job of the maintainers of a package easier, by 
> providing a central list, with various kinds of metadata, of all of the 
> changes that have been submitted.  The other is to make it easy for the 
> community to bypass the maintainers completely, and use a package 
> version from the fixes archive as the de-facto release if need be.
> 
> So maybe we're putting the cart before the horse, here.  I won't, 
> personally, agitate any more for reducing the number of things that go 
> into the update stream until we have a reasonable substitute that works 
> for packages.  But are we all agreed that building such a thing is 
> necessary and desirable?  And can we talk about how such a facility 
> might work?

I am all with you.

> The first step, I think, is to have an easy equivalent of "mail 
> changeset to list" that works for packages instead.  I envision this 
> maybe uploading a package version to a central FTP site, from which we 
> can generate daily RSS or mail list posts etc.
> 
> Thoughts?

Well, I would like for such a mechanism to use SM somehow.

Now, SM has an optional PI-name for a package.
This means we can map the PIs in the image to SM entries and thus get
info about the package - like who are the maintainers (primary and
co-maintainers) etc. We could easily add an "inbox" field so that a
package can say where it wants fixes to end up. Some possible choices:

1. As changesets in email.
2. As changesets in an ftp area.
3. As Monticello version in an ftp area.

> Avi

regards, Göran

PS. Also added an RSS-field on package by request from Brent.