> >            The BSD community has grown to
> > 	resemble a college fraternity, with its own set of
> > 	"hazing" rules, which, thankfully, Linux and other
> > 	Open Source software projects seem to have sucessfully
> > 	avoided.
> 
> Could you please elaborate on the "hazing" rules?

It's where you take the new guys and make them eat worms until
you feel they've eaten enough worms that they can be full
members of the club.

You can tell you are a full member of the club when you are
allowed take the new guys and make them eat worms until you
feel they've eaten enough worms that they can be full members
of the club.

Most military organizations have the same type of initation
rites, except the Rangers, where, when they take you and make
you eat worms, it's called "training", and you know what you
are getting into before you sign up for it.

Basically, it means "technically meaningless behaviour that
does nothing to advance the organization, which you are
nonetheless expected to engage in as part of the price of
participation, above and beyond the value of the effort which
you are willing to donate to the cause".


> > I think the reason the "openports" thing hasn't really
> > gotten anywhere yet in displacing the ports trees of the
> > various projects, is that there is not demonstrable benefit
> > for the majority of the people doing the actualy work: 
> 
> Do you mean openpackages.org?  That project is still fairly 
> new.

Yeah, "openpackages", thanks.

> We're not even at the stage of having a ports tree ready
> for public consumption.

That was rather my point.  When you get to where you have a
ports tree ready for public consumption, how are you going to
get the projects to switch over to the new system?  A lot of
people have an investment in continuing to do things the way
they have always done them, particularly the poor slobs^W^W
people who thanklessly^W cheerfully maintain individual ports,
and have an exiting investment in getting on a project specific
committers list, and have invested heavily in learning a project
specific way of doing a port.

Getting a ports tree ready for public consumption is probably
the least of the worries you are going to have to address,
unless you already have buy-in from at least two of the projects,
at least one of which is FreeBSD.

It's not an impossible task, but you need to address the
biggest issues first, in order to minimize risk to the point
of getting sufficient volunteer effort to get something ready,
and it's very hard to nail down a commitment from a BSD project
from people who have the power to make them, without presenting
a fait accompli.  The main watershed event will be when one of
the projects drops their packaging system, and all "cvsup"
for that project is from your site instead of the project
specific site.

Don't worry about it; it was just a handy example, and you
already have Satoshi and some of the others on board, so it's
probably not as much of a political uphill battle as it seems
from the outside (which is what made it a good example).

As a pointer of the type that I hinted at: a compelling value
that you could add would be browser-based installation, using
your own web server (or mirrors) that have a MIME-type that
runs a signature validation program based on certificates of
known signers, so the installations can be done as "root"
with a single click for install.  Another value would be to
do a local browser plug-in to seperate "installed" and
"uninstalled" views, but you could do that by downloading the
certificate signed signature first, and then checking for an
exisitng install based on that (but it's less pretty), or by
using a local hierarchy ("file browse") in order to get the
same effect.

It's pretty trivial to do all of these things, if you require
OpenSSH and some other things to be installed before you go
(you would need to patch the local copy of the MIME types for
the browser to invoke your scripts, though...).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.