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Re: Proposal: Source file package format (summary)



On Fri, Dec 31, 1999 at 06:36:43PM -0500, Paul M. Foster wrote:

<snipped much of earlier conversation for sake of bandwidth...>

> Here's another gripe about dselect. When I install, dselect asks me for
> the root directory on the CD-ROM. How the hell do I know? 

The nice part about it (without having looked at the code, only the user
interface) is that it appears that the different "methods" of getting
debian packages in dselect are very modular.  If someone wants to either
fix the existing code for cd-rom installation or write something
completely new, it would appear that it can be put in the menu fairly
easily.

I think what stops most developers from making changes to the cd-rom
stuff is that once the system has been loaded in the beginning, 
which is the ONLY time I personally use the cd-rom stuff, most
people switch to using apt for getting their updates/upgrades.

The cd-rom software's just not used enough to warrant enough brain
damage to want to fix it.  Apt, on the other hand, appears to be
highly maintained and changed to add/update features regularly,
and the newer console-apt (capt) and other apt-based tools like
apt-get and it's various flavors seem to be catching more folks
eyes (and hearts) these days.

On a side note: 

After reading a whole lot about CVS over the past few days, I'd
love to see more developers and development teams in all sorts of
projects using it -- It'd make the casual "hack" easier to perform
to continually add functionality and features to software that
otherwise just falls beneath the radar scope of most developers.

The ability to grab a quick snapshot of the current development
stuff on older pieces of software that are not always under
much development effort would be nice, but it requires that someone
take the time to do the setup and maintenance of the archive and
a place to put it that's got decent bandwidth to the Net.

I'm still learning about how to set up CVS properly for Open
Source projects, but someday down the road I hope to have all my
small projects in CVS and would probably be willing to help out
other folks get their stuff in it too.  Very very useful tool, 
as it encourages just the kind of development that Open Source/free
software requires to thrive.

The Coriolis OpenPress book, "Open Source Development with CVS" is
very good and most of it is GPL.  The chapters on the politics
and reasoning behind how to set up successful Open Source projects
is not free, however.  Even so, the purchase of the book is well
worth the asking price, IMHO.  www.coriolis.com I believe.

I suppose this type of discussion should move to -devel, so further
replies will be sent there, if any...  :)

-- 
Nate Duehr <nate@natetech.com>

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