On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 03:19:45PM +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
(Sorry, this is going to be a longer post, covering a lot of basics, but I feel even most Linux Squeakers are unaware of how open-source software actually gets to users in Linux)
Bert,
Excellent description, thanks for this.
Maybe having a mailing list specifically for maintainers would be useful? But even just tracking down what packages are already out there, who is maintaining them etc. would be very valuable. And monitoring the bug trackers, participating on the distro-maintainers lists etc. Here is just a short list for squeak packages in various distros:
Debian: http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=squeak-vm Fedora: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/packages/name/squeak-vm Ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/squeak-vm OpenSuSE: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/smalltalk/openSU... Gentoo: http://gentoo-portage.com/dev-lang/squeak Arch: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=13021
A mailing list sounds like a good idea. I would certainly want to monitor that list to understand priorities for things that might need to happen on the VM team, for example if there are are tasks with timing constraints driven by the various distro release schedules, or if certain bug fixes or enhancements should be given some extra priority.
Of course I don't mean to suggest that the Linux distros should receive any particular priority over say the iPhone platform, or RiscOS, or whatever; just that right now I'm quite clueless as to what those distros need or what the deadlines are, so I think that your mailing list suggestion could help give us all some visibility to those requirements.
Dave