[arch-dev-public] Repo Distinctions

[Aaron Griffin]

On 10/16/07, Simo Leone <simo at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Sounds like making a mountain out of a mole hill to me.

At first, I didn't think Simo was right. I thought this would go the
way of a sane discussion.

But in typical devland fashion, we decided to stab this issue to death
with the knives of blather.

Let me see if I can steer this cart away from the cliff a bit, but we
might be going too fast to abort.

Everyone makes these grand claims like "repoman will fix THAT" and
"lets move TUs up and start 'firing' crappy packagers" and all these
sorts of things. Don't get me wrong, they're perfectly valid
suggestions and good ones.

The problem is the timeline. This is always an issue. A lot of these
suggestions will take a large chunk of work, and a lot of effort.

I know how our dev team works. If we actually decide that these things
are a good idea, there will be two people doing the work while
everyone else keeps wondering why it's not done.

So we simply can't do that. Fact.

We need to move in baby steps. We WILL have a problem implementing
these large sweeping suggestions, so here's the question I pose to all
of you who have very strong opinions:

What's the first step?

I don't want to look at these giant "we can finish this in 3 months"
solutions. What I want is a "here's a small step that helps solve it
and works toward the larger solution".

The other option, of course, is for someone to sit down, write some
code, and "put your money where your mouth is", as they say.