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Whenever I tried to get into packaging something during the years, I've bumped into politics and policy issues associated with each project to a lesser or great

by wvh 3y ago

Whenever I tried to get into packaging something during the years, I've bumped into politics and policy issues associated with each project to a lesser or greater degree. Technical knowledge is not enough, you must also really get into each project's rules and mindset, find a sponsor/mentor, adhere to its standards, gain trust, attend meetings, learn a specific tool set, all of which is a whole different ballpark compared to throwing a working technical solution over the wall.

cinntaile 3y ago
I think that's the purpose, you want to filter out anyone that is not highly motivated because otherwise you'll have to invest a ton of time into many different people and you don't have that kind of bandwidth.
- gunapologist99 3y ago
  > otherwise you'll have to invest a ton of time into many different people and you don't have that kind of bandwidth. but who is investing this time and bandwidth? It seems like this sort of governance model allows politics to replace egalitarianism or meritocracy. I could have become a Debian contributor/packager many times over, but it always seemed not worth it for a thankless job which is mostly dealing with bureaucracy and red tape instead of actually solving technical matters. (To be fair, I've since moved on to Funtoo, which, like Gentoo, is very egalitarian -- but requires a certain, rather high, level of technical interest and expertise which is its own filtering function. On the other hand, Debian's packaging policies are very strict, and many distributions have much less strict packaging policies.) How do the less-difficult distributions such as Arch or Alpine do it with less overhead (and is that better or worse?)
  - novok 3y ago
    I always kind of wonder why self packaging isnt a better supported thing in general? Like if i use macos, why not read the brewfile from the repo directly and so on. Your are already trusting the software to not mess with your system to a certain extent anyway
  - Macha 3y ago
    Honestly I'm not so sure the arch packaging situation _is_ that healthy these days. More cases of updates being long delayed for stuff like glibc and some security fixes. I hope the gitlab migration ultimately opens up more contributions to a more nixos-like contribution model
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  Good luck doing it without starting a cult or a monastery, though. How does one start a successful monastery, by the way?
appplication 3y ago
This is really the barrier for me. I’ve written plenty of (company) internal packages that end up getting moderate adoption, but trying to open source is an exercise in personal marketing. It’s insufficient that your project solve a problem. You have to convince people to use it and make PRs to other repos that would use it, monitor SO for questions, etc.

by wvh 3y ago

cinntaile 3y ago

I think that's the purpose, you want to filter out anyone that is not highly motivated because otherwise you'll have to invest a ton of time into many different people and you don't have that kind of bandwidth.

gunapologist99 3y ago
> otherwise you'll have to invest a ton of time into many different people and you don't have that kind of bandwidth. but who is investing this time and bandwidth? It seems like this sort of governance model allows politics to replace egalitarianism or meritocracy. I could have become a Debian contributor/packager many times over, but it always seemed not worth it for a thankless job which is mostly dealing with bureaucracy and red tape instead of actually solving technical matters. (To be fair, I've since moved on to Funtoo, which, like Gentoo, is very egalitarian -- but requires a certain, rather high, level of technical interest and expertise which is its own filtering function. On the other hand, Debian's packaging policies are very strict, and many distributions have much less strict packaging policies.) How do the less-difficult distributions such as Arch or Alpine do it with less overhead (and is that better or worse?)
- novok 3y ago
  I always kind of wonder why self packaging isnt a better supported thing in general? Like if i use macos, why not read the brewfile from the repo directly and so on. Your are already trusting the software to not mess with your system to a certain extent anyway
- Macha 3y ago
  Honestly I'm not so sure the arch packaging situation _is_ that healthy these days. More cases of updates being long delayed for stuff like glibc and some security fixes. I hope the gitlab migration ultimately opens up more contributions to a more nixos-like contribution model
WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
Good luck doing it without starting a cult or a monastery, though. How does one start a successful monastery, by the way?

appplication 3y ago

This is really the barrier for me. I’ve written plenty of (company) internal packages that end up getting moderate adoption, but trying to open source is an exercise in personal marketing. It’s insufficient that your project solve a problem. You have to convince people to use it and make PRs to other repos that would use it, monitor SO for questions, etc.