Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
Announcing something on cygwin-apps means that the other maintainers will look at it if necessary, and that someone with access will eventually upload it to sourceware.org. Once that happens, the package will be announced on cygwin-announce, and *that* does mean that it'll be available via setup soon. :-)
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Ahhh...hmm...I haven't understood (and am not entirely sure, if
yet, I do) the package release mechanism. I would have thought that
package maintainers would have been able to check in their packages
directly -- perhaps, at least, under the experimental release section.If I understand you correctly, package maintainers first have to announce something on cygwin-apps, then a few people who have "cygwin-package approval" status eventually find the time to check in the change?
If I understand the linux-kernel model, different folk who are maintain a particular driver or subsystem are responsible for collecting any suggested changes to their "package" and check in changes themselves -- a distributed delegation model, whereas, if I understand you correctly package owners aren't delegated the authority to check in/release new versions of their packages?
From what I gather, linus used to require all changes go through him for pre-approval, but after it became "big enough", he was willing to delegate check-in authority to specified package maintainers(?).
Isn't the cygwin project large enough to delegate peripheral (non-core) package update/checkin or is the cygwin source management model not flexible enough for this granularity? Or does cygwin have a need for each individual package to be checked in.
I wondered about this when I found a completely separate package distribution (that appears to no longer be supported but was located at http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/index.html). Why didn't they just release their packages through cygwin/setup? Seems like they have a ton (http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/apps/en/bestlist.html) of packages for cygwin, so many that put together a CD of gnu apps that run on cygwin.
I'd never even heard about them before they went to "no maintenance" mode...*sigh*...why weren't they developing under the standard cygwin/setup package model? I was just surprised by all the packages that were available for cygwin outside of the cygwin project and wondered why they felt a need to release their packages separately -- they sure didn't get very good publicity -- I ran into them when I wanted to see about "cdrecord" being ported to work under cygwin...Apparently it was, at some point, as well as a bunch more utils. Very strange.
They claim the release doesn't have a "maintainer" even though many of the packages do. Is it possible to "invite" them to participate through the main cygwin site or was there some reason they would refuse?
Seems a shame to see so many utils go to waste...
-linda
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