In my talk at the Maemo summit 2008, I talked about starting an effort to reduce the number of external repositories. Talking about this helps, but actively contacting developers and repository owners helps even more. This week I started by creating a list of all repositories we need to target. When this was done, I started to contact a lot of developers to convince them to move their packages into Extras and then close their repository.A funny thing to mention is: Nobody had any objections to this.
Most responses were apologies for not doing it sooner. When I started this, I expected to have some resistance, but so far there was none.
This is a good thing! It seems the community wants things to change too.
How can you help?
If you know somebody developing applications in their own repository, try to convince them to move their packages into Extras(-devel). Please edit the wiki page to reflect the status of each repository.With the help of a few people, I think we can get number of repositories in the list down quickly!
Visible results
When looking at the Gronmayer listing, you can see that more and more repositories are being removed and end up as: 'Repository is offline'.
2 comments:
This is so cool! From my user-only point of view, this is probably the best thing happening around Maemo at the moment. It will make life so much easier (and Maemo so much more impressive for a new user).
As for the Wiki page: "Closed" means "repository shut down, packages moved to extras", right? For completeness, it might be interesting to learn why repositories marked "closed" show more packages in the column "packages in repository" than "packages in extras". The way it's presented now, I read it like "We lost some useful applications that didn't make it into extras".
Finding all the apps at one place. This is way cool and it should be like this only. Thank You for your efforts in trying to get this thing done. NIT is suddenly becoming even more appealing!
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