Re: Request for a version/ revision/ release number for the whole cygwin release/ distribution

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Sat, Oct 02, 2004 at 12:03:02PM -0700, Brian Dessent wrote:
>David Christensen wrote:
>>This wish was inspired by my positive experiences with Debian "stable"
>>-- e.g.  feature frozen, unit and integration tested, with updates
>>limited to bug and security fixes.
>>
>>Please note that Debian is a volunteer effort:
>>
>>http://www.debian.org/devel/join/
>>
>>If they can do it, I bet we can too.
>
>Quick reality check: Debian has over 1300 registered developers --
>vetted, trusted package maintainers with CVS commit access.  They
>probably have tens of thousands of clueful users that report bugs and
>follow up as necessary, and many hundreds of thousands of installations
>from which to take reports and collect stats about bugs.  They have an
>elaborate infrastructure for their 12 supported platforms, and god
>knows how many hundreds of mailing lists and sub-communities.  And of
>course the user groups, donated corporate support, etc.
>
>Cygwin barely has 1300 _total mailing list subscribers_.  At last count
>there were less than 1k people subscribed to the main Cygwin list, and
>another 400 or so on digest mode.  If I had to guestimate the number of
>"developers" who actively develop and patch Cygwin it would be between
>5 and 10, with probably another additional 20 or 30 total package
>maintainers.

It's more like 3+ real developers.

The total number of unique subscribers to cygwin, cygwin-apps,
cygwin-talk, cygwin-xfree is 2542.

I was using Fedora as an example but the concept is the same.  Bringing
up Debian reminds me that the other thing that happens in this kind of
scenario is politics.  Again, I saw some of this in Fedora but it was
exacerbated by the strange relationship between Fedora and Red Hat.

I've never paid close attention to Debian but I've heard that it has
all sorts os laws and bylaws for dealing with contention.  I suppose
you could just duplicate those for cygwin.  Or maybe you could try
to go the XFree86 route.  That would be interesting.

The biggest obstacle, though, is that so far no one is lining up for
this new plan.  You obviously need people who think it's a good idea
if you want to progress.

Well, another obstacle is that the original proposer doesn't seem to be
reading email...  That's not a good sign either.

cgf

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