WhoDo wrote:My understanding was, from the various threads that were discussing the early development of 4.2, that you would be leading the core development part of the community effort for the 4.2 release. I coordinated the inclusion of whatever I was given, including making decisions about what was in or out. With very little input in the way of material changes to the core, except for some important changes to the init script, there was nothing for me to "coordinate" from that part of the program.
Barry and some of the old-timers wanted me to do it and I refused, partly due to technical limitations, but mostly because (as I stated on Barry's blog)
there's nothing to coordinate.
Who are the "maintainers" you work with? The only maintainers around here I can think about are me (unofficially maintaining rarsa'a network-wizard, just because I'm the one who bothered to try and fix and improve it) and people like Sigmund and Jason Pline (plinej) (and gyro etc.), who went ahead and wrote P* apps and by default are their maintainers (and disciple, with things like the trash appdir). And there's tempestuous, obviously, the Puppy janitor, cleaning up after others and trying to get things working for users.
So, as far as I'm concerned, 4.20 is basically a WhoDo/ttuuxx puplet.
I'm pleased to note that you have recognised the focus of 4.2 was NOT to produce "a whole new distro", and your clear recognition that what we produced was indeed only a "polish", packages and usability update from 4.1.2, as I foreshadowed way back when the project started. That's why I wasn't too worried when guys like you and tempestuous didn't take a whole lot of interest in the Deep Thought project.
If there is some serious effort to update the core, including a new T2 build from Barry, then 4.3 will be the eventual product and that will require a significantly longer testing cycle, more involvement from core devs like you and tempestuous, and less emphasis on packages and polish.
This shows what the basic problem: when Barry announced his retirement*, you folks went ahead and planned a new release, instead of starting from the ground and getting together a group of people who can actually build a distro (as I put it back then: first be able to replicate the existing Puppy, before you go and try to enhance it).
So where are you now? You're planning on
Barry to get the new build done for you -- but he's supposed to be gone!
I'm not attacking you or anything, I'm just pointing out the reality, as it seems like Lobster has spiked some people's drinks around here...
Why do you think muggins needs the "keys to the official repos"? If he needs something included there, that can be coordinated through me for the next release. I don't see the problem.
Anyone who's been on this forum for a while should have noticed by now that muggins has been posting dotpups/dotpets to the forum on a daily basis for the past few years (even now that he's in Tazzie -- is that a vacation, or was W'gong too warm for him??) -- and that's not the way to go. Someone like him should be given the power to create "official" packages (following some guidelines about how they should be made) and upload them to the repository, then update packages.txt before every release (and no, he shouldn't have to get permission from you for every package, as he is in a better position that you to decide if the package is ok or not! He's the one who saw the sources and compiled them). As it is now, he is a "wated resource".
And please will everybody stop talking about Git? Git is an SCM. The "S" stands for
source. What should be in git is directories with the various Puppy scripts and sources for Puppy-specific apps. Not compiled binaries or tarballs -- there is no point in that. And it certainly won't change the way things work around here -- people moving their arses will.
*- I don't really consider Barry as being retired from Puppy: the only way to keep him away from Puppy is to keep him away from computers... so all he did was escape the responsibility of "having" to care about problems people are having -- since Puppy is his toy, not something he created to add any more stress to his life (hey, I'd say moving to Middle Of Nowhere, WA is probably a matter of trying to
escape responsibilities...).