[csw-maintainers] OpenCSW Summer Camp

[Philip Brown]

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 07:13:53PM +0200, Peter Bonivart wrote:
> Well, to identify which packages should go into which tier we could
> use another suggested topic of mine - download stats.

Those stats might be skewed in terms of which packages get frequently
updated, not neccessarily in terms of importance.
And then there is a relative definition of "importance". 
Does it mean "popular", or does it mean "critical to other programs"?
Or some combination of both?

As far as "importance" goes, I think a fairly basic and concrete measure
would be, the number of dependants that a package has.
eg: gtk2 has around 100. Thus, it is incontrovertibly an
 "important package" ;-)


> Yes, but that usually only happens when we already have a problem and
> the current maintainer doesn't respond, that's what I want to avoid.
> 
> To me, it would be good to identify the most critical packages and
> allocate resources in the form of active maintainers to them but if
> the community doesn't agree that's fine with me. Topics were asked for
> and I provided a few.

I actually agree that it is important to *identify* critical packages.
I just dont think we can go around making statements that they "must" be
maintained in a particular manner.

btw, if you'd like to spend some time putting together a dynamic page with
a dependancy-ranked chart of packages, correlated with which ones are
non-maintained, I'd be happy to email you more about how to access our
various databases with that information.