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

[Robby Workman]

Eric Hameleers (SBo) wrote:

> 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.


I'm exchanging emails along these lines with Kyle Guinn right now -
he's got a couple of submissions that might as well be Klingon apps
so far as I'm concerned, and I simply *have* to defer to his judgment
on what is and isn't needed in them.


> 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.


On that note, there's something else I've been considering for a while
now -- how about we change the AUTHOR field to MAINTAINER instead?
That way, the original author of the script would retain copyright
notices (if applicable), but it would allow for easier denotation of
exactly who the contact person should be.  As it stands, I don't like
the idea of changing the AUTHOR field since it implies that the
AUTHOR has changed (which is impossible without a wholesale rewrite).

-RW