[argyllcms] Re: Argyllcms 1.0.1 packaged in fedora-devel

On 2008 Jul 27, at 11:47 AM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> I  think  you should  have  more  respect  for people  who  have
> maintained thousands  of apps  for more a  decade and  know very
> well what makes them waste their time or not.
>
> Graeme's solution does not scale. It's as simple as that.

This is truly  veering off topic, but I would  merely suggest that
our differences lie in the notion  that thousands of apps needs to
be maintained  by anybody but their  authors. ``Packaging'' should
be no more than a Web page  (etc.) with links to the binaries (and
seperately to the source).

When those  package maintainers started maintaining  packages more
than a decade ago, resources  were terribly limited. And they came
up  with crude  hacks  that worked,  much the  same  way that  the
computers of more  than a decade before that  required even cruder
hacks to work with a fraction of a megabyte of RAM.

But today, all that should be  necessary is something as simple as
``put your entire  binary distribution in a single  folder; have a
subfolder in that  called `bin' that will get added  to the $PATH;
and use these other special files and folders if you want niceties
such as a custom icon and global searching of documentation.'' One
of those niceties can even be a cryptographically-signed mechanism
to identify  that a  new version is  available, thus  reducing the
role of ``maintainers'' to publishing  a list of links to software
they recommend / certify / whatever.

But, as you write, the maintainers  have over a decade invested in
byte-pinching and tight central control mechanisms, and are loathe
to change  their ways. Quite  curious from  a group  as ostensibly
devoted to  free-spirited cooperative  anarchy as  the open-source
movement.

Cheers,

b&

Other related posts: