This is the mail archive of the
cygwin-apps
mailing list for the Cygwin project.
Re: [ITP] astrometry.net-0.38-1
On Mon, Nov 07, 2011 at 11:49:45PM -0500, Charles Wilson wrote:
>On 11/7/2011 11:17 AM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> I've been trying not to offer an opinion here but it isn't clear to me
>> why so many people voted +1 for this package. It seems like we're
>> adding a huge package
>
>Meh, if you exclude the star catalogs (and I think we should; and the OP
>has agreed to avoid), then bin+src weighs in at 25MB (65MB
>uncompressed), which is pretty large but not unheard of.
>
>Most of that is because it has a ton of exe's, and all but one are
>linked statically to various support libraries. (Oddly all of those
>libs get dumped together into the DLL, and that dll is used by only one
>client. But, conceivably, the other exes could also link to that dll,
>for a big win: from 45MB uncompressed to approx 2.5MB, based on my
>seat-of-pants calculation).
>
>> to the distribution just to help out a very
>> miniscule user base.
>
>Meh, without casting aspersions, I doubt the user base of our various
>specialized math tools -- like singular, octave, fftw3, qhull, etc --
>are very large in absolute terms. But...we have maintainers, they
>volunteered and contributed, so here we are. If they go AWOL, then the
>package gets slapped with _obsolete.
>
>Same deal here.
No. It's not, and please avoid the obnoxious "Meh"s. There is no need
for that affectation unless you are purposely trying to offend.
Given this reasoning we might as well do away with votes entirely since
it doesn't really matter if anyone will use the package as long as
someone is willing to support it.
The packages that you are talking about are commonly used Linux
packages, found in other distros. If we didn't have something like
them people would be asking for them. You certainly know this.
>>Do we really need this package in the Cygwin distribution?
>
>Well, not as such, no. We don't really NEED very much of what's
>currently part of the distro -- but that's never been the justification
>for package acceptance. Do we "need" fortune or robots?
Cygwin is supposed to be like a Linux distro. Including packages which
come with Linux distros is a no-brainer. Including a large, specialized
package which is not commonly found on Linux and which has a small user
base is not a no-brainer.
I really can't believe that I have to explain this or that you really
think you're making a valid argument.
>I think it's kinda cool for cygwin be one of the first (not THE first;
>it's already in BSD ports IIUC) to provide these tools, so that's why I
>voted +1.
^That is actually the type of answer I was looking for. I wanted to
know why people thought the package was needed in the distro.
>However, you're still (one of the) benevolent(?) dictators-for-life.
>Are you exercising a veto?
If I was doing that you would have seen the word "veto" in the message.
Given the fact that the votes needed to trickle in over the course of
more than a month, it seems that most people don't feel very strongly
about including this package. I understand that the OP wants to have a
convenient way of distributing it to the small number of people who need
it but I don't think that is necessarily a good enough reason for the
package to occupy disk space and bandwidth on sourceware.org and
mirrors, for potential package support to show up in the cygwin mailing
list, and for someone to take time to upload updates to sourceware.org.
I was wondering if anyone else felt like I did about this package. If
it hadn't required many weeks to get approval + more weeks to get
packaging worked out, it would have gone in without comment from me.
Since it did drag on and required multiple pleading messages to keep
things moving, it certainly seems like there isn't a lot of enthusiasm
for getting this in.
The bottom line is that I was trying to ask why people voted +1. If it
was just to "help the guy out" then that's not a really good reason for
the package to be in the distro. If it was because people thought this
was "kinda cool..." then that would imply that there was more thought
involved.
cgf