[csw-maintainers] no one else who matters? (was CSWcswclassutils: it wants to write in /usr)

[Gary Law]

Hi

2009/12/16 Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com>:
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 2:57 PM, Gary Law <glaw at opencsw.org> wrote:
>>... Blastwave. They have a larger installed
>> base, more hits on google (*much* more in fact, and more recent new
>> pages that refer to them too), active forums and IRC channel that
>> suggest plenty of users.
>
>
> So lets fix that.

Fixing that is not a bad idea. However, until it is fixed, we should
recognise that we're not the dominant software distributor in the
/opt/csw space. It is therefore unwise to make statements along the
lines of no-one who matters will ship software with conflicting names.

> It has already been proposed that we need to make an effort to
> "advertise" ourselves better. I think that those people who are
> interested in doing something about this, should form an off-list
> "working group", to improve the situation.
>
> I am interested in this, also I think William... who else is willing
> to actually DO something about it?

I've chatted to William about this on IRC, and I love what he's done
with the beta website. Let's get it launched and get google trawling
it.

>> What we have is, IMHO, better software.
>
> yes we do.
>
>> We completely lack credibility otherwise,
>
> I'm not sure how this translates into lack of "credibility".
>
> To my mind, its just the opposite. Keeping the same prefix, that many
> of us had, while we worked on "CSW at blastwave", emphasises that it
> belongs to us, the true continuation of "The CSW packaging project"
>
> Changing it, reduces our credibility, by denying the above.
>
> I will remind you that "CSW packaging" is *NOT* a creation of Dennis
> Clarke. He merely hosted it. He never "owned" it, even though he liked
> to give the appearance that he did.

No-one owns a name space in this context. But whatever the rights and
wrongs of who owns the name the mature and sensible approach at this
stage is to walk away from the /opt/csw space (and CSW packaging
prefix) because someone else is using it. Never mind that it wasn't
his idea, the conflict is damaging.

>> In this particular case, of course, this is a real problem. I've got
>> to go to my provider of zones and say ' install this package ' and
>> hope none of their other customers ever want to use Blastwave. If I
>> was a commercial provider of zones, and had an understanding of these
>> issues, I'd refuse to install our package (and the Blastwave one of
>> the same name) just to avoid future support headaches.
>
> I think that the conflict works in our favor; users have to choose
> between "install blastwave", or "install opencsw", and thus do an
> evaluation of "which is better?"

Or say, 'sod it, neither of them untill they sort their act out'.
Which is what I would do if I were such a commercial provider  --
there's no way I'd 'take sides' like that.

> Almost any sane organization that does the evaluation, will concur
> that they are better off installing *our* packages.
>
> For cases where those organizations have an issue of, "we really like
> your packages, but there's this specific issue where blastwave has
> ...." hopefully, they can be encouraged to actually mention this to
> us, and then we can FIX it.
>
> I will take a moment to point out that we are way ahead of blastwave
> in up to date packages at this point.
> Since this is a public list, and the "advertising/promote group" has
> not been formed yet (and I i think would deserve first say on how this
> is disclosed), I wont mention exactly how far ahead we are.
> But take my word for it when I say *very* far ahead.

This should not be a matter of Blastwave vs. OpenCSW any more than
OpenCSW is 'vs' Sunfreeware. All should be able to exist
independently, no admin should be forced to choose.

We're getting close to the point where most of our software is in GAR
(which is where this thread started, I'm having trouble with /usr!)
which means we can rebuild and retarget on mass.

Gary

-- 
glaw at opencsw.org