[Fedora-packaging] MinGW subpackages of OCaml packages

[Jason L Tibbitts III]

>>>>> "RWMJ" == Richard W M Jones <rjones at redhat.com> writes:

RWMJ> Everyone's happy with me to go ahead with this?

You have to torture reality pretty badly to assume that silence
somehow implies happiness.  Maybe people are just annoyed to see this
come up again.

So here's one from someone who was never all that comfortable with all
of this Windows support in the first place:

During the discussions you were somewhat adamant about the limited number
of Windows library packages that your proposal would entail.  You
quoted numbers and relatively small size requirements as evidence that
this was no big deal.  Now you're talking about taking what is
something of a niche package category (ocaml packages) and adding a
second level of niche-itude to them (windows cross-compilation
environment for ocaml packages) and I'm wondering if the overhead of
these packages was included in your initial figures and whether you
actually think that anyone other than you will actually use them.

I mean, sure, if you're a packager and you can get someone to review
your packages, you can basically turn Fedora into your own personal
distro, with the specialized packages that you want already in there.
I don't think that's a bad thing.  Even better if other people happen
to benefit from those packages.  At some point, however, someone needs
to actually think about how the cost of this compares to the benefits.

I do have a couple of other hands in the fray, though:

As a package reviewer, I think you've already dropped a metric ass-ton
of packages on the review queue and I shudder to think that you would
consider actually adding more without spending at least a solid month
helping us review packages.  Avoiding having to review another pile of
whatever-for-windows packages would be great.

As a Packaging Committee member, I would want you to at least add
sufficient comments to these specfiles to discourage anyone who might
want to package an ocaml module from using them as examples unless
they somehow want to maintain them for Windows as well.  After taht
long review process we have what I think are a good set of ocaml
package guidelines with nice templates, and now you're proposing to
take the bulk of those packages away from that.

 - J<