Re: [packagekit] [gentoo-dev] Inviting you to project "PackageMap"

[Sebastian Pipping <webmaster@hartwork.org>]

Robert Buchholz wrote:
> On Saturday 13 June 2009, Sebastian Pipping wrote:
>> One of the stronger points for collaborating at the source is that
>> poeple who are not Gentoo devs (yet) and therefore have no write
>> access to the Gentoo tree can still extend and fix the Gentoo
>> packagemap entries.  Doing it downstream would hurt the whole project
>> in several ways.
> 
> To drive the project forward and find cross-distro acceptance, the 
> packagemap repo/server has to be the authorative source of information 
> for distributions that participate.
> 
> However, I see advantages in a distributed model to collect the 
> information. Gentoo developers could feed <cpe> tags into the 
> metadata.xml of the tree and do not need to sign up to commit to the 
> third-party packagemap repository. Synchronizing changed tags to the 
> packagemap repository should be easy to automate. Changes in the 
> repository could be propagated back to the tree by a designated team of 
> Gentoo developers interested in the packagemap project.
> 
> I have a feeling other distributions might also favor a model where they 
> have more control about the data without giving all their devs access 
> to one big repo.

Paul Wise of Debian also articulated interest in doing database building
at distro level, so that's one more point /for/ your feeling.

However there are a few more things to take into account,
please have a look at my reply to Paul:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/popcon-developers/2009-June/001759.html

Sorry for not CC'ing you, I should have though of that.

Thinking the other way around:  Is there anything we could do
to make the central place approach work and feel better for everybody?



Sebastian