[PlanetCCRMA] moving PlanetCCRMA to Fedora Extras?

[Florin Andrei]

Hey everyone, I've been using CCRMA for a long time now, although I
wasn't too active on the mailing list.

Anyway, there's something I've been thinking of for a while and I kind
of like the idea: would it make sense to merge PlanetCCRMA into Extras?

There are already all kinds of packages in Extras. The music / sound
packages would not be, by any means, out of place there.

Also, I am not sure how much time Fernando has to maintain Planet, but I
remember him complaining a while ago about lack of time. I don't know
the current situation. In any case, Extras is a much bigger project and
it's much less likely to run out of human resources (in terms of
maintainers).
The biggest advantage of the move would be that it would make it much
easier to distribute the workload to many more package maintainers.
Having more maintainers means faster package updates when new software
versions are released.
I would be happy to maintain, say, LMMS, JACK and all plugins, Qjackctl
and ZynAddSubFX, plus all the libraries required by them that are not
already in Extras. Maybe also a couple of bigger packages such as
Rosegarden. I like Hydrogen too.
I was actually thinking to push the packages mentioned above to Extras
regardless of the outcome of this proposal, but I feel it's pointless to
do a redundant effort.

Another advantage of merging Planet into Extras is that Extras is by
definition "clean" and that would reduce the incidence of the PRH Effect
(Package Repository Hell) which is getting pretty annoying these days.

Another big plus is that this way the Planet packages will be much more
deeply embedded into Fedora. Instead of having to enable a repository
that they never heard about, people would be exposed to all the
music/sound goodies by simply installing Fedora (Extras is enabled by
default in yum). A much larger audience than the current one, which can
only benefit everyone.

The merge doesn't have to happen in an instant. Instead, packages can
migrate gradually, as individual maintainers step up and grab packages
and push them through the approval process at Extras.

Of course, a small number of packages may never migrate - things such as
custom kernels. But that's OK, since those don't add essential
functionality, they just enable convenient aspects.
There are also packages with questionable licenses that will never be
approved by Extras, but there's already a plethora of repos already
taking care of all those packages and more.

Well, I'm stepping down from the soapbox now and I'm listening.

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/