Re: [DebianGIS] Ping: Changes in Debian GIS Blend stuff
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 11:05:06AM +0200, Johan Van de Wauw wrote:
> The blends-style page looks nice. Thanks for your effort
Good you like it. :-)
> I don't really get the link between the projects success and the
> presence of metapackages and/or a blend (in fact I even didn't know
> that blends existed),
Well, having metapackages is a technical issue of a Blend. I'm
entertaining every DebConf and at other events talks[1] about why I think
that it is important to not provide a flat pool of packages but add some
substructure to the Debian universe to help users easily to pick the
packages they need. This is only one aspect of a Blend (you could solve
this also by proper DebTagging for instance). The other aspect is that
I try to establish some team of maintainers that feels responsible for
the set of packages in side the blend, do favourably team maintenance
and invite others to join the team. This team forming is can be simply
supported by having some kind of infrastructure which ranks around these
tasks (which are turned into metapackages). All this is described in
the Blends documentation[2]
> it seems quite logical that succesful projects
> can manage to find someone interested in creating such a blend.
> I *do* believe having a discussion how debianGIS could attract more
> people is interesting, so thanks for raising the issue.
> I believe the only way to get more developers is to attract more
> users, and giving them a chance to contribute in their own way, eg by
> helping out people with gis problems on the mailinglist.
Yes, this exactly is the idea and the formalism should be a technical
base for this idea because some convincing technique will attract
people. To have a common formalism (Blends idea / technique) amongst
user oriented projects in Debian should create synergy effects.
> Perhaps we should collaborate more closely with the osgeo live cd team
> - check which of their stuff can be included in debian instead of
> added by them.
Even if you have not heard about Blends before - exactly this is part of
the game: Bringing derivatives back, making them use Debian really the
source of their work and perhaps let them release kind of a "rebranded
Blend". This is for the profit of Debian and osgeo (at least if it is
what I guess - did not checked).
> Does anybody read policies? Adding a 'how to help' part in the wiki
> seems useful, but having a 'policy for packaging'?
There is no real need for all to reading it. For instance we are team
maintaining most packages in Debian Med and so we are pushing the policy
a bit - and people just see that it is good. ;-)
But nothing against just an additional Wiki entry: It just makes
sense to agree in a team for certain rules no matter in what form these
are written down.
Kind regards
Andreas.
[1] http://people.debian.org/~tille/talks/
[2] http://blends.alioth.debian.org/blends/
--
http://fam-tille.de
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