On 10/25/2017 01:43 PM, nicolas.mailhot@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Hi Jason,
Packaging deps is a virtuous circle: it makes the work of the next person who needs them for other software easier, which increases the chance other software is packaged, which increases the value of the distro as a whole, its attractiveness, and the probability that someone will eventually do something useful for you (not limited to co-maintaining your packages). It's a long term virtuous investment circle.
Not packaging deps is less work in the short term, especially when you're among the first to arrive on an underdeveloped part of the distro, but has no positive externalities (and potentially negative ones as it can be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the distro, discouraging others).
Believing in long term effects made Red Hat. Free software is the ultimate long-term investment. It's a lot of work to make software available in a form that may be consumed by others, without any guaranty someone will ever return anything useful. Yet it is successful, because together people are stronger than alone. Many entities that didn't understand this tried to outcompete Red Hat by focusing on actions with immediate returns, and skimping on long shot investments like sharing stuff with others. They had limited successes in attracting long-term customers, in building communities, in getting others to cooperate.
We all like to receive, but to receive you need to give first.
I can't argue with that.
What I can do is present my painful experience.
I want to use fluentd (a medium sized ruby application) + a half dozen
or so plugins packaged as separate gems.
This puts me on the hook to be the maintainer in perpetuity of 90+ ruby
RPM packages (for all of the build time and run time dependencies). Not
what I had in mind.
This wouldn't be so bad if there were some sort of automation that would
constantly scour rubygems.org for updates and automatically update and
build the rpms.
Regards,
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