[Slackbuilds-users] Policy to modify someone else's script

[Eric Hameleers (SBo)]

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Alan Hicks schreef:

>> And even I'm going further: Because the sbo maintainers has limited
>> time to understand each package, perhaps it is better to involve the
>> original author to the acceptance process, when somebody else made any
>> changes.
> 
> I've argued before that eventually we will have to do something along those
> lines as the project keeps getting bigger and bigger.


I'd like to see, and Robbie voiced this too in the past, that
submitters of a SlackBuild would assume responsibility for their
submission in the longer term. Submitting a SlackBuild and then
forgetting about it is what I would consider bad practice. Call it a
'social contract' - you provide the community with something you
found useful and want others to profit from, but that imposes a
certain responsibility for what you brought into this world.
This is valid even for something down-to-earth as a SlackBuild.

Like Ferenc pointed out, some of the SlackBuilds in the repository are
 quite specialized and were written by people who know what tweaks are
needed to create a high-quality package. The SBo admins try to see
through this process and judge the submitted scripts for what they are
worth, but in some cases you just need knowledge of the produced
application to make a sane statement about it's usefulness and quality
- - especially because the more complex software can be compiled and
built in so many ways with so many flags and parameters that it needs
experience and expertise to understand how these flags affect the
binary application.

So in the end, I'd like to see that anyone who submits a change to a
SlackBuild that is more than a VERSION bump, contact the author(s)
listed in the SlackBuild header and/or the .info file, to see how the
changes in the script affect it's quality. A guideline like this,
would allow the SBo repository to grow further without the admins
becoming the bottleneck for growth.

Eric
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