[Slackbuilds-users] Fwd: gnome-desktop SlackBuild source is 404'd

[B. Watson]

OK, this got a bit long and started turning into a FAQ. Bear with me,
hopefully it helps explain. However, don't take this as "the party
line", SBo deliberately doesn't have by-laws, parliamentary procedure,
a "steering committe", or any of the formal stuff a large project
might have. It makes us flexible, but it also makes us inconsistent:
you might get a different answer depending on which admin you ask.

What you see in this email is my take on the situation, and other
admins might respond with their ideas.

On Tue, 11 Feb 2025, Gustavo Brondani Schenkel wrote:

> About a email, when I was waiting 4 months with the script for Packer and 
> Terraform to submit, you guys sad to "wait is not ready yet", then I couldn't 
> check the site for 3 days, and someone else has submitted a package and was 
> accepted.

That, I wasn't involved in. Was this during the time right after 15.0
released, and the submission form on the site was closed?

...it looks like it might have been. Terraform was added on March
31, 2022, less than 2 months after Slackware 15.0 got released. So
you had it ready to submit, but submissions were closed... and when
submissions opened again, someone else submitted it.

I'm not sure how to avoid that happening. It was just bad timing. You
had let someone know that you had these ready to submit, but it got
forgotten about for whatever reason.

See the bottom of this email, the part about "development cycle",
which might give you an idea what was going on during that time.

> We could have contributing directly, just editing the text directly from 
> GitLab, but since you don't accept work from non-maintainer, this can't 
> happen, which is funny because since I submitted the gnome-desktop I didn't 
> received any message from any who altered the code until now.

We don't accept changes from anyone but the maintainer, *or* from one
of us (the SBo team), *or* from someone who got permission from the
maintainer.

All the changes are in the SBo git log. You can clone the repo and run
"git log libraries/gnome-desktop" or view it with a web browser here:

https://git.slackbuilds.org/slackbuilds/log/libraries/gnome-desktop

Looking at the commits, two of them are yours... Willy and Heinz are
SBo admins. Heinz's changes were applied repo-wide to all builds:
everything has the "Support $PRINT_PACKAGE_NAME", "SlackBuilds run
in the directory they are in", and "Change SlackBuild shebang to
/bin/bash" in its history, and everything that uses ninja has the
"Support alternatives for ninja" there. Willy's update was to remove
libseccomp from REQUIRES, possibly because it's not actually required.

When SBo admins make changes to the SBo git tree, no automatic
emails are sent. This is because we use git (withiout any
github/gitlab extensions) for the primary repo, and git doesn't
send emails. Normally, we *do* email you before messing with your
build. But sometimes trivial changes (changing the DOWNLOAD to a
mirror site because the original went away) don't seem worth an email.

The system-wide changes (which reflect changes in the template)
affected thousands of builds. They are rare, and they are announced on
the mailing list when they happen.

You're expected to periodically rebase your git branch on master,
notice the changes in the log, and if there's something that you don't
like, you email whoever made the change.

I *am* kind of curious about the commit by Igor Alexandrov. He did
a version update, but didn't change the maintainer info to his own
name/email. Was this done with your knowledge and permission? Someone
on the SBo team must have approved it: normally if we get a submission
or PR on a build from someone other than the maintainer, we contact
the maintainer and ask if it's OK. Did anyone contact you about commit
90594b47526e025e7f17a60c1b504f752cfa8d02 back when it happened (June
13, 2021)?

> Where is the transparency when changing the code from other people?

The code changes and the people who did them are in the git log. What
other transparency should there be?

There is also another factor: there are two alternating "cycles"
at SBo. Normally we're in "release cycle", which is the usual
state. When a new Slackware release is made (or maybe a bit before,
when a release candidate or beta is released), we close the submission
form and go into "development cycle". It takes a lot of man-hours of
work to update all the builds from e.g. 14.2 to work correctly with
15.0. For a given build, sometimes that just means a small change
in the script, or adding a patch. Sometimes the cleanest way is to
version-update the build instead of trying to patch the previous
version.

During the dev cycle, there's a lot of frantic scrambling by the SBo
admins to get all the work done in a reasonable amount of time.  As a
consequence, we don't send mail to maintainers about proposed changes
and wait for responses. If something needs fixing, one of us fixes it.

This isn't documented anywhere because it's not something that was
planned out ahead of time. It's how our practices have evolved over
the years. Probably there *should* be a FAQ on the site that explains
all this.