[csw-users] Outdated packages e.g. GCC 4.3 instead of 4.6 - reason? ; Suggestion new packages?

[Maciej Bliziński]

Em 28/07/2011 02:27, "Victor Hooi" <victorhooi at yahoo.com> escreveu:
>
> heya,
>
> This is more of a curiosity question - but I was wondering why the OpenCSW
GCC package is at version 4.3.3, and not version 4.6.1?
>
> I noticed Sunfreeware is also at GCC 4.3, so was wondering if there a
specific limitation on Solaris that precluded GCC 4.6 from being used?

The workforce is the bottleneck. The gcc maintainer has retired from the
project. There has been work done towards the upgrade, but it's not trivial.
In general, gcc is not easy to build on Solaris. Perhaps other maintainers
can give more details on the gcc upgrade issue.

Also, if anyone from the user community wants to help with building gcc,
maintainers will provide all the resources and help possible.

> There's also a few other packages that are a couple versions behind:
> Wget 1.11.2 -> version 1.12 (September 2009)
> Cmake 2.8.2 -> version 2.8.5 (July 2011)
> Mercurial 1.8.4 -> version 1.9 (July 2011)
> Ruby 1.8 -> version 1.9.2 (February 2011)
> Puppet 2.6.9 -> version 2.7.1 (June 2011) - but 2.7.2 should be out soon,
I believe.
> Is there a mechanism where people can flag these packages to let
maintainers know? Or if there's a reason they're being held back where
should we look to find out the reasons?

As things stand now, it's about someone sitting down, building all the
updated packages and testing them. At times, testing is the harder part, as
the person who built the package might not use it and might not know how to
make sure it works. As a user, you can help by requesting an update of a
package, and testing it by installing from the experimental catalog. This is
not recommended for production machines, as new packages can be broken in
new and interesting ways.

> Secondly, is there also a mechanism by which we might suggest packages to
add to OpenCSW, or vote on them even? Or is the mailing list the best place
for those discussions?

For new packages, there is a form you can fill on the website. For existing
packages, there is the bugtracker where you can file a bug requesting and
upgrade.

The mailing list is a good place for discussions and asking whether the
issue at hand should be filed aas a bug or not. We also recommended visiting
the IRC channel for a bit of informal chat.

> For example, two packages I'd like to nominate are ccze and Python 3.

There is a testing version of Python 3.1 in the experimental catalog,
although it might need a rebuild because of the libffi split. If you're
interested in test driving 3.1, get it from experimental and provide your
feedback. In general, packages that receive feedback from the community are
more likely to be updated/fixed/improved than others.

Maciej
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