Low traffic on maintainers@

Ben Walton via buildfarm buildfarm at lists.opencsw.org
Sun Jan 5 16:30:05 CET 2014


On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 10:23 PM, Dagobert Michelsen via buildfarm
<buildfarm at lists.opencsw.org> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> (f'up on maintainers@ after some discussion with Maciej)
>
> Am 29.12.2013 um 14:49 schrieb Maciej Bliziński <maciej at opencsw.org>:
>
>> On Sat, Dec 28, 2013 at 04:43:49PM +0100, Dagobert Michelsen wrote:
>>> Am 28.12.2013 um 13:49 schrieb Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński <maciej at opencsw.org>:
>>>> Did you notice how quiet the maintainers mailing list has become? 25 messages compared to ~130 in previous years, I'm wondering if something's wrong?
>>>
>>> I'm afraid nothing is wrong and people are just moving away :-( Rupert announced
>>> to not use Solaris any more, Phipsy also, and very few new maintainers.
>>

I'm no longer using Solaris either and I don't have the cycles to keep
up with maintaining packages using only my personal time. I do miss
being more involved in the community because it is a great, if small,
group of talented people.

>> Yes, maybe it's a fundamental problem where the use of Solaris goes
>> down, and the general interest in packages does too.
>>
>> We had an influx of new people at some point, but it did not result in
>> too much actually built packages. We've failed to follow up on them for
>> more than a year and I fear that the opportunity is gone. For example,
>> I contacted axisys, he responded and said wants to create a package with
>> something, and he disappeared again.
>>
>> I think we've lowered the entry barrier, but maybe our packaging system is
>> still arcane and based on tribal knowledge?

I was recently surprised when a user declined becoming a maintainer
because even after watching the video they thought it was still dark
magic. I don't have a way to gauge the skills of this person, so I
can't measure the person against the problem, but it was still
noteworthy.

Thanks
-Ben
-- 
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