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Posts: 1,101 | Thanked: 1,185 times | Joined on Aug 2008 @ Spain
#246
Originally Posted by Graham Cobb View Post
Eh? Garage is nothing to do with current software -- it is a place to host shared projects. If there were any active projects in garage their owners could move them to some other service, of which there are plenty. Non-active projects would be archived with all their code available to anyone to download (as today) but with all the garage services terminated.
Garage is more than the hosted code. It is the hosted code, the documentation, the bugs and the posts, at the very least all of it whould have to be mirrored in its current form to allow search engines to work. We can lose the services and go elsewere, but not the site.
And the autobuilder is nothing to do with the repositories except that it is the only way, currently, to put packages into them. The repositories would be opened up so that the small number of developers who wanted to put software in them could do so directly, or via a volunteer who handles the occasional submission. Of course submissions would have to include both source and binary packages.
IMHO you are wrong here. The autobuider is the right way to go, just look at any distro out there. It provides a normalized and repeatable environment to build the packages, a way to make sure all build dependencies are right and available for everyone, and helps in keeping the quality of the source packages high.
I am not proposing doing any of this now.
My point is just that it is very likely that by the time Nokia pull funding, there will only be a small community of users and developers left, who can manage very well with just forums and a repository. That is a lot more than we had in the early days of the 770 community! There is no particular need to try to plan for keeping the current (expensive) infrastructure going indefinitely, as the community shrinks.
And I see no reason to lose that much, if we can keep it. It is not that expensive (vm hosting is cheap today, isn't it?)
So we agree in how premature is to discuss pruning our infrastructure now.
In due time, we can assess how much each thing costs, what resources we have, and what we can keep or not.
 

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