[csw-maintainers] An idea: OpenCSW on FLOSS Weekly

[Philip Brown]

I think this is a great idea. Some comments...



On 12/23/10, Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski <maciej at opencsw.org> wrote:
> ...
> Ideas for topics:
> - what our base system, Solaris (9, 10), is
> - why OpenCSW is important
>   - we make open source software easily available on a commercial platform
>   - we bring GNU userland to Solaris: grep which understands -r, and
> sed which understands -i
>   - we provide up to date software (compared to the companion CD)
>   - we respond to specific package requests
> - Package installation tools (pkgutil, pkg-get)
> - Porting software to Solaris
>   - wrestling with different build systems - this would be a good
> opportunity to tell a little bit about them, as FLOSS Weekly featured
> scons and waf enthusiasts in the past.  We could point out a couple
> things that upstream developers should think about, such as library
> linking, rpaths, custom prefixes, etc.
> - Our package build system (does all the right things with
> autotools-driven packages)
> - Solaris zones, and Solaris sparse zones support
>


Somewhere in there, should be the idea that in some ways we do things
better than even IPS :)
(having a nice unified config file to control whether demons
autoconfig, for example)

and our nice simple filebased archive. stuff like that.

Also, we need to officially put to rest the issue of our quality
control, in the sense of , are we in the business of making the "best
possible" packages? or just "whatever the maintainer feels like"?
recently, seems like certain people were pushing for "whatever the
maintainer feels like".
Which does not look so good for advertising.

> We need to be prepared to answer the following questions:
> - how many users (give an estimate)
> - what kinds of users do we have (individual / corporate / institutions)

See my prior comment. If we really are aiming for corporate, as well
as the above, then we need to *commit* to "best possible".


> - the size of the developer community
> - how to get involved / where to find us
> - good to give some metrics such as numbers of updated packages per month /
> year

could just check the weekly package announces for that, if they are
archived somewhers. I think they are.


>
> We would need 2 or 3 people to speak on the show.

I'd be willing to speak, depending on the timezone and particular day
it falls on.