[pacman-dev] Package signing in pacman

[Rémy Oudompheng]

On 2011/5/20 ari edelkind <edelkind+arch-pacman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 10:45, Jelle van der Waa <jelle at vdwaa.nl> wrote:
>>> I'm not downplaying the effort that Allan (et al.?) has put forth -- i
>>> think it's excellent!  But so far, this has all the markings of a
>>> single-person project, being coded by someone who doesn't _want_
>>> contributions.
>>>
>> You're wrong here, it's not a single person project, i have seen Dan and
>> others commit  package signing implementations too.
>> For example:
>> http://projects.archlinux.org/devtools.git/commit/?id=c16e7c25c9432e0d2f0fdeea30f08ad2ffe6950b
>
> I'm not wrong.  That's what the "(et al.?)" was for.  It still has the
> markings (appearance, feel, or facade, if you will) of a single-person
> project.  The fact that others who are intimately familiar with pacman
> --- and have been in ongoing discussions with Allan --- have committed
> changes does not change my point.  And remember, Dan is already a
> committer for pacman.  By definition, he's intimately familiar with
> it.
>
> Even if a non-committer has spent many hours, or even days becoming
> familiar with the project, and then managed to eek out a patch that
> was found useful, requiring that a would-be contributor do such a
> thing is disrespectful to that person's time.  Worse, would-be
> contributors are likely to move on and spend their time elsewhere.

Hello Ari,

You seem to be complaining about lack of documentation in pacman's
source code. Tha answer is probably that no, we are not really
motivated to write documentation, and the reason is very simple.
Nobody in the current contributors has time to do that. The API is
documented, which is at least nice. This is no disrespect in any way.
Writing proper documentation requires work. Trying to attract new
contributors requires work too.

People have hardly the time to do this work. Of course it is
desirable, maybe it's a pity this work is not more developed, but we
are all volunteers. If we are not motivated for this work, we are not
going to do it. We are pleased to see people who are interested, if
you are willing to contribute, yes, you can spend time reading the
code, understand what it does, and then contribute documentation, and
help pacman become more developer friendly.

Feel free to ask any question on the mailing-list about pacman and
libalpm and the current development directions. If I remember
correctly, I think Dan considers the current implementation to be
almost feature-complete, maybe except for tiny details.

Regards,
Rémy.