Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> On 11/13/06, David James <james@cs.toronto.edu> wrote:
>
>> +1. These binaries (built by D.J. Heap) are official and we should
>> treat them as such.
>
> I think you misunderstand me. :-) I'm saying that it's a *bad* thing
> that we've started endorsing and supporting "official binaries". This
> represents a big policy change, breaking with 5 years of tradition.
> Our downloads page has always said:
>
> "The Subversion project does not officially endorse or maintain any
> binary packages of the Subversion software. However, volunteers have
> created binary packages for different distributions and platforms, and
> as a convenience, we maintain a list of links to them here."
Users of Subversion on Windows already consider those binaries
(including the installer) as official, based on:
a) The svn binaries for windows can be downloaded from the official svn
website
b) They are created by full members of the svn development community
c) 99% of the Windows subversion users who use the command line client
don't build it from source, but use these binaries.
I don't think there's a reason why we should have official binaries for
Windows, but not for Mac or Linux. In the end, people using svn binaries
just want to download them from someone they trust, be it a distribution
maintainer, as part of a separate application (TSVN) or from a
commercial packager. For the windows binaries, that happen to be some of
the same people also working on the actual source code.
Given the fact that almost none of the Windows people will build
Subversion from source, I do feel that we should test the quality of the
Windows binaries thoroughly before they are released to the public. If
people have problems with the svn binaries, they will turn to the
Subversion project for support.
If you feel that the policy of not endorsing binary packages should not
be changed, then we should definitely put more space between the
Subversion project and the binaries. What about creating a separate
project page svn-packages.tigris.org, where package maintainers have a
repository to maintain packaging scripts, a place to store the binaries
etc? That way we can cleanup our downloads page, while at the same time
providing our users one single place to download binaries from.
Lieven
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Received on Mon Nov 13 21:46:32 2006