Re: [9fans] plan9port lacks exportfs server

["Roman V. Shaposhnik" <rvs@sun.com>]

[I believe we should go off-line if you're interested in continuing this
discussion, since it has very little to do with plan9port at this point.
I'll reply to the portion that has relevance on the list here, and will
reply to the rest of your email privately]

On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 01:15 +0100, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> Of course I'm building
> binary packages, too, but they're always specialized for some
> particular target system, not general purpose, not comparable
> to what common binary distros do.

So you DO build binary packages. And you WANT to build plan9port
as a binary package? Then, you should be expected to put a reasonable
effort into making that happen. Doing virtual Tom Sawyering and
trying to convince developers that they should be putting that effort
instead of you is fine tactic, I don't deny. Tom Sawyer got lucky
doing that, you seem to be out of luck so far :-)

> > The kind of value that project members are simply not interested in.
>
> I know, and that tends to be the point where I fork.

Yep. And that's the entire point here. See, I happen to also work
on a project where we can *afford* to be arrogant and self-serving.
The world needs us, not the other way around. Hence we don't even
do formal dotted releases anymore. We try to be diligent about
tracking the progress of the external APIs by bumping a version
number in a couple of macros, but otherwise -- all packagers have
is our history in an SCM. It is up to them to decide that a particular
point in that history has certain properties (like stability, or even
fitness for a given purpose). It is up to them to fork and work
on those properties. We, as developers, are not interested in making
these claims. In fact, if we were making these claims without
proper investment in QA and design specs we would be grossly misleading
the public. We don't want to be liars.

Now, most of the stuff written by the likes of Ken and Russ and the
rest of the usual Plan9 suspects always works (and now, I'm not
being sarcastic one bit here -- I'm actually constantly amazed at
how superior these human beings are at software engineering). Thus
when Russ says it is 0.4.1 it really *is* 0.4.1. So may be the QA
argument doesn't apply to plan9port all that much.

But the fitness for a particular purpose probably does.

Only you as a packager can answer the question: who are you building
your stuff for. And once you do -- you will see a much clearer picture
of how it is supposed to be packaged. More to the point, that picture
is very unlikely to have anything to do with source code development
practices.

Thanks,
Roman.