[csw-maintainers] Dependencies on SUNW packages (was: newpkgs libslp1, openslp_devel)

[Philip Brown]

On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 10:46 AM, Peter FELECAN <pfelecan at opencsw.org> wrote:
> Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com> writes:
>
>> On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 8:57 AM, Peter FELECAN <pfelecan at opencsw.org> wrote:
>>> Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com> writes:
>>>...
>> you are strongly against listening to our users?
>> an odd sort of attitude.
>
> You're distorting things. Asking for an user base pool is always part of
> your strategy of last defense: playing the advocate of the nebulous user
> base.

They become less "nebulous" if we actually ask them about their needs.

Based on prior experience dealing with CSW user complaints, I know
that some users will be unhappy if we needlessly clone sun packages.
Ideally, you might accept my experience on this.
But, presuming you wont, and you doubt that users would be unhappy, we
should settle the issue by asking them.

If on the other hand, you dont CARE if some users are unhappy, then
that's a whole other problem.



> If an user has a strong opinion about our maintainceship the best
> he has to do is to propose patches and/or to become a maintainer. Of
> course, there is the users mailing list, the bug-tracking system that I
> read and if the request is reasonable an action follows.

Making a large policy principle change, not bothering to check if it
makes users unhappy, and then reverting it down the road when users
bother to complain, is a sign of a user-hostile development process.
Not to mention an inefficient/chaotic process.
That's not a good thing for opencsw, in my opinion.

This is not a maintainer-internal-only issue. This is a directly
user-facing issue, both in the specific slp case, but also in the much
larger general policy case.