[Slackbuilds-users] Updates - 20170204.1

[Erik Hanson]

On Sat, 4 Feb 2017 11:59:49 -0800
King Beowulf <kingbeowulf at gmail.com> wrote:

> Given Slackware's goal for, and, yes, reputation as, a stable, solid
> Linux distribution, then SBo should have that goal as well.  There
> will always be those who dabble in -current and so treat Slackware as
> a "rolling release."  That's fine.  However, I think most of us rather
> prefer stability over wiz-bang newness.

The only goal has been to provide a large collection of quality-tested
scripts. SBo is maintainer driven, it doesn't cater to what any portion
of the audience wants.

> My preference, as a maintainer, is that SBo does not succumb to
> "version creep" and sticks with STABLE packages that are as bug free
> as possible given the nature of F/OSS. Since I use most of the
> packages I maintain, I do not need the hassle of constantly upgrading
> and troubleshooting some weird lib breakage.

No one is forcing you to update your scripts, you maintain them, you're
free to do what you like. You're also free to not use other peoples'
scripts if they don't meet your needs.

Maybe it's easy to forget, but SBo isn't a small group of maintainers
who write and care for all the scripts in the repository. There's
something like 900+ maintainers. It isn't reasonable to enforce a rule
of "only stable versions" on everyone, for a variety of reasons. Some
software never releases as "stable", some stable releases are outdated,
unusable, buggier, etc. than a beta or git branch. Individual
maintainers get to decide what's stable, and the onus of support is on
them.

It's also not feasible for the admins to make sure everything being
submitted falls under some measure of stability. For that reason alone
the decision of what a maintainer wants to maintain needs to remain with
them, and our involvement stops after making sure the scripts meet with
quality guidelines.

> A solution to "newness" may be to have a branch of SBo-current that
> tracks Slackware-current.  That way SBo-stable can be kept free of
> multiple versions of newer packages until we can work out the bugs and
> patches.

This is not going to happen. Also, please stop referring to scripts as
"packages", SBo does not provide packages.


-- 
Erik