[packman] packman future

[Ralf Corsepius]

Am Don, 2003-01-09 um 16.59 schrieb Henne Vogelsang:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thursday, January 09, 2003 at 15:17:26, Hendrik Muhs wrote:
> 
> > We have talked about it several times (Henne, me and maybe some others).
> > 
> > Now that the hardware problems are solved for some time, I would like to 
> > restart the discussion about future enhancements for packman.
> 
> Good Topic :)
>  
> > 1. We sholud become more international.
> > 	than Karol and some others can contribute.
> > 		(http://sourceforge.net/projects/suserpm/)
ACK, long over due ;)

> > 2.  Is the very complicated web-interface really necessary???
> > 	all the information we have to fill in can be easily extracted from the 			
> > 	rpm-Package, why not a automatic script, which runs as cron job every day 		
> > 	and/or can be started by the web-interface for urgent fixes 
> 
> I see the webinterface and the database marc manages not only as an
> "fill in information and forget" tool. I see it also as a kind of
> quality assurance. 
Hmm - I don't.

In a nutshell:  The current maintenance form is 
* widely improvable (read: it sucks)
* error-prone (How many times did you enter a wrong path and dig through
the menus to find the entry you are searching?)
* time-expensive to use (Upload 1min, 10mins of filling out the form;
sometimes followed by another 10mins of chasing bugs.)

=> To me, its the primary obstacle to contribute rpms and more
bureaucracy than actually being useful.

> If publishing a package boils down to spit it on a
> directory somewhere and some automated script does anything else then, it
> will infect quality.
Bummer - Actually, I don't see any relation of this form to quality.

What I am actually missing is kind of an "upload-script" that can be
prepared off-line. Something like an form to be filled out which then
installs everything into the appropriate location on Marc's server.

[Basic outline: Write an xml-form which shall accompany any rpm, upload
this form and rpm to Marc's server, and run a script there to interpret
this form and to install the files into the appropriate
locations/database etc.]

>  Also it is nice that i can change e.g. the
> information for a package without rebuilding the package itself etc.
> etc.
> 
> But for sure the webfrontend could use some work to make it easier and a
> little bit more automated. I jabbert to marc and he said maybe the
> scripts could gather the information from the package as proposal for the
> package entry or something like this to make it a bit easier to publish.
Hmm, why not - but I doubt all information can be extracted from rpms
(eg. further packages at packman)?

> > 3.  specfile database
> > 	for internal use it would be helpful to have a specfile-database somewhere 	 		
> > 	for all our packages, in a private dir on the server or via CVS(via the 		
> > 	SF-account)
> 
> Sounds usefull.
I don't have an opinion on this. It might be useful for some persons,
but I doubt it will be widely used.

>  But i vote against CVS.
IMO, if yes, I vote for CVS. It's not more difficult to use than ftp ;)

>  It would be overkill imo.
Why? Admitted, it would be somewhat more work for Marc, but not from a
user perspective, however ... as expressed above, I doubt such
repository would be widely used.

Ralf