Re: [9fans] Man pages for add-ons

["EBo" <ebo@sandien.com>]

"Federico G. Benavento" <benavento@gmail.com> said:

> other thing that deserves noticing is that there are 2 kind of needs
> for packages, some people want to develop or like knowing what's
> going on, so replica works for us as we get to see what files were
> modified and when.
>
> contrib(1) was written with this kind of user in mind, try to convince
> erik to drop replica and you'll hear the justifications :)

;-) I'm learning more about these things all the time.

> on the other hand you people that don't care about the source and
> just want to run their apps, for those a package system that with
> only runtime stuff makes more sense.

I see this as a little more complicated for two reasons.  1) administrating
distributed systems with group supplied applications that are widely used but
not part of the OS, and 2) maintenance and development cycles.  How do you
propose managing the source/executables for ver 1.* (stable) 2.* (stable), 2.*
(experimental), and maybe even 1.* (backport)?  Even for my personal stuff I
have had lack of versioning bite me -- I was working on a spatially-explicit
modeling project, and had made some updates.  One of the ecologists came in
and asked me for some data which was not generated in the original modeling
runs, so I added it... only to find that the new version of could not read the
old input...  Took days to reconstruct everything.  To make matters worse,
this was in response to a review in a good journal, so time was of the
essence.  So, in this case I had maybe 20 users at 6 universities in 3
countries running at least two incompatible versions.  When I talk to these
people I needed to know which they were using, and fix any bugs for the
appropriate version.  I cannot expect them to stop what they are doing and
simply upgrade at my whim.  I should also note that it often takes 1.5 to 5
years from the start of an ecological field project to when it is published.
So, users might be using a given version of software for years before they
complete their projects.

As a note, I do not care how these things are accomplished, only that I can.
It may be that there are ways (replica & contrib) which allow for this level
of control, but I have yet to figure it out.

> on lunixes you have binary packages and then you use svn/hg/whatever
> to get the source and get synced.
>
> to me this is the real question, not where do we put the binaries,
> the latter is just a convention and taste related, while the first
> is an actual problem for some.

I see this as another very important, but separate, issue.

  EBo --