Compatability with FreeBSD Ports

[Martin P. Hellwig]

Chris Pressey wrote:
<cut>
Back to the practical point of view... my two cents:

All the lists, prioritization, and organization in the world won't help
if there isn't someone willing to put in the effort; someone to take on
"package stability" as their task, like how Max has taken on make(1) or
how Sascha has taken on syscons(4).
A vision is great - critical, in fact, as a sort of social contract -
but only insofar as it attracts people who are _already_ self-motivated.
I'm sure there are several people who will be willing to step up to the
plate for package maintenance, regardless.
And I'm sure that when popular stuff breaks, they'll be the first to
know.
And, if they need lists and other administrivia to help them track it -
well, they can make them.
And if the project wants to help them make those things, it should give
them tools to do so.
Well my perception of a successful open-source project is that they 
mostly start because of an itch, it stays alive through the work of 
talented developers and can only succeed by user base. Users usually 
chose for technical superiority, coolness and available 3d party tools.
To get users enthusiast you have to give them some candy first, 
eventually they through in sugar for them self, so what do you need?

Well the typical popular serverish things are probably already built in 
or no problem via pkgsrc (like apache, squid, qmail etc. etc.)

Although GUI desktop software does say nothing about the quality of a 
server it is often the first experience. So you need to make absolutely 
make sure that the most popular software work, so what is that?
Well me thinks:

x11 (xorg)
desktop (kde & gnome)
browsers & mail (mozilla, firefox, thunderbird, evolution & opera)
productivity tools (openoffice)
Looks not much at first but these above package have a load of 
dependencies like scripting languages, media-players, frameworks and 
other numerous toolsets. But maybe this is a nice 3d party list to go for.

--
mph