On Sun, 9 Mar 2003 brook@biology.nmsu.edu wrote:
> My hope is that I can use this information to free some resources to
> enable all of you to create more packages.  However, to do so, I need
> some reasonably correct information about the time commitment
> required.

Creating is insignificant, and it's not really where I see much demand for
help. Time here is something from 30 minutes up, as long as there's no
special adjusting needed, and may go into days and weeks depending on your
ability to solve problems. Try OpenOffice 1.0 for something non-trivial.
(Look at the patches of the existing pkg and you'll get an idea - this
isn't just a simple matter of programming/packaging).

Updating - either manually or even via some PR - is more interesting, as
it needs time to test. Look if patches are ok, check runtime behaviour(!),
adjust PLIST. Even with a ready-made patch in a PR, that's still the same
procedure we maintain to assure quality of pkgsrc. Time here is something
between 15 minutes and also hours.

The area where we suck massively right now is bugfixing, as it's very time
consuming, and also (often) needs access to special hardware, software
config and if that is fulfilled, debugging clue. This can go into hours
per pkg. This is also the reason why we have a lot of PRs queued up.  Of
course in an ideal world, the pkg's original author would do that work,
but we do not life there.


 - Hubert

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