the creature from the black lagoon.... or dealing with OS cr…

On Tue, 2003-10-14 at 11:37, Deepak Saxena wrote:
> On Oct 14 2003, at 11:07, Bart Garst was caught saying:
> > Further more, if they can't provide a package for something as common as
> > Mandrake, RedHat, or Debian, further suspicions as to the quality of
> > their stuff arise.
>
> The fact that somegroup of developers don't provide nice pre-built
> package for "common" distributions is completely irrelevant in regards
> to the quality. Some large projects such as Gmome, KDE, etc have
> pre-built RPMs b/c a) they have a developer base of hundreds of people
> and more importanlty b) they are funded. Not all open source projects
> are well funded and being an open source developer I can tell you
> that I am far more interested in writting code then making nice
> packages to make other people's life easier. That's the reason that

Isn't the point of writing code to make someone's life easier? (couldn't
resist :-)

I am curious though, how do you guys(?) handle packaging? Have you had
any luck finding (good) volunteer packagers?

> distributions exist. If a package is not supported by someone's favorite
> distro, they can always ask them/pay them/volunteer if having a pre-built
> package is that important.
>
> Developing software and productizing/packaging software are two
> different beasts that should not be confused.
>

I agree with your point. My original comments were poorly worded. I was
referring to the "if I'm not getting paid, I'm doing as little as
possible" mentality. And yes I'm fully aware that this mentality is not
the norm.

Bart