Brandon Invergo <[email protected]> writes: > Obviously, I'm interested in maintaining a clear picture of the use of > GSRC when something more powerful like Guix is available. It's best, I > think, to consider it important for users of other distros who want to > install GNU software when: a) they don't have permission to install > system-wide, b) their distro does not provide the latest/desired > version, c) their distro does not provide the "plain/vanilla" version, > d) their package manager does not allow to easily rebuild a package from > source.
I was part of generating the idea to do GSRC, so I can say why I still think it's important given what I had in mind then. I thought that having a periodic coordinated release of as much of the GNU code as possible would have many beneficial effects that don't have to do with a user actually installing every program included in the release: * Periodic coordinated releases are incentives; they give maintainers and contributors reasons to take action at particular times and therefore might help get things done. * Since the build process is uniform, it also serves as a kind of quality control step. At the very least, some build errors will be caught; but as the project develops, maybe code that is too buggy in certain ways will be left out of the release. * Helps provide an incentive (by way of clear sensible benefits) for maintainers to use the common infrastructure. "If you host your code on ftp.gnu.org, then your package can be included in the GNU Source Release." * Helps provide a clearer image of what GNU is. They provide publicity opportunities and give potential users something they can wrap their mind around -- GNU is this code. Better and more grokkable image means more contributors, more users, and more advocates. So, I think this is an important project with different benefits than a packaging system designed specifically to deploy and undeploy different configurations of software, and I hope you can continue working on it. -john -- John Sullivan | Executive Director, Free Software Foundation GPG Key: 61A0963B | http://status.fsf.org/johns | http://fsf.org/blogs/RSS Do you use free software? Donate to join the FSF and support freedom at <http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=8096>.
