[csw-maintainers] [csw-pkgsubmissions] yaz

[Dagobert Michelsen]

Hi Phil,

Am 18.01.2011 um 22:09 schrieb Philip Brown:
> On 1/18/11, Dagobert Michelsen <dam at opencsw.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Phil, your constant nagging about documentation is a real PITA.
>> Fixing these takes an amount of time (probably on every release)
>> which has no resemblance to the main package. We have A TON of
>> really outdated, not packaged PRIO-1 stuff. Do you really think
>> we should focus on documentation instead of having e.g. an updated
>> Kerberos or PHP? Fixing doc issues in all packages takes a regular
>> amount of time in terms of *hours* I don't have for version
>> bumps.
> 
> I think you are rather exaggerating.
> For the most recent email I sent off about..  oh whatever it was..
> editing the info file, and doing the gar "make a patch" thing, should
> be much much less than "hours".
> it should in fact, be less than a single hour. More like 20 minutes,tops.
> 
> Wasnt the whole point of having the auto-git stuff in gar, to make
> small patches like that trivial?

I won't make this kind of patch. If I fix it I do it right. That means
moving the documentation to autoconf substitution. There are already
too many patches I have to take care of on upstream bumps. If upstream
not already has done the autoconf-integration my patches probably
won't get accepted anyway.

The GIT patch integration is mainly there to allow compilation
at all and provide patches to upstream.

>> For a 100% package we should fix it, right. But we are not
>> at 99%. Or 95%. Or even 90%. We are more at 75%. Focusing on
>> docs is IMHO the wrong priority.
> 
> So, in your opinion, it's better to have 100 packages at 80%
> "correctness", than  80 packages at 100% "correctness".

In my opinion it is better to have 100 packages at current
versions with some incorrect docs than allowing 20 important
outdated packages and correct docs for the rest.

> I happen to have the opposite opinion. Because if we dont fix up those
> packages now, they probably never will get fixed.
> But if we fix up "the 80" *now*, then we have our hands clean to get
> the other 20 clean later on.
> 
> If all this is "too much work for you right now", Dago, why dont you
> just slow down, and do fewer packages at a time?

Because I don't *want* to spend the effort in the package.
For most people (including me) it is good enough if the
package works at all (and that is already hard enough).
We are far (*far*) from this kind of quality you are
envisioning. My pace is driven about 75% by customer demands
and 25% by fun. Updating docs is in neither of the two
categories. I have 0% bugs files for wrong documentation,
but some for functional defects, version bumps, missing
SMF integration, AUX library support, pending upstream
work on SE Toolkit, reenabling automatic builds and a ton
of other stuff. I will not squander my time by fixing
documentation details for prio-3 packages where upstream
is too lazy to do so.

Don't get me wrong: If I had 50 packages to maintain
instead of 500 I would probably enjoy making 100%
packages and tweak every little bit of it. But having
the maintainer power we have it is IMHO really
important to focus on the important things and allow
to have some fun on the rest.


Best regards

  -- Dago