Bikeshed: a foster home for orphan tools
Dustin Kirkland recently announced a new package for Natty called 'bikeshed':
* http://
Bikeshed is a collection of random but useful tools and utilities that either don't quite fit anywhere else, or have not yet been accepted by a more appropriate project. Think of this package as an "orphanage", where tools live until they are adopted by loving, accepting parents.
Too often, contributing a small, useful script to an upstream project is many orders of magnitude more difficult than actually writing the code. Thus, many people have handy tools hidden in their own $HOME/bin directories.
Things to discuss in this session:
* Are there potential foster parents (ie, better homes) for some of the current utilities in the project?
* Do other people have useful tools that they'd like to contribute?
* What's in your $HOME/bin that other people might find useful?
* Would ubuntu-dev like to assume maintenance/
Blueprint information
- Status:
- Not started
- Approver:
- Robbie Williamson
- Priority:
- Undefined
- Drafter:
- Dustin Kirkland
- Direction:
- Needs approval
- Assignee:
- None
- Definition:
- Drafting
- Series goal:
- None
- Implementation:
-
Not started
- Milestone target:
- None
- Started by
- Completed by
Whiteboard
Current toolset:
* 1..9, NF
* bch
* bzrp
- talked to Robert Collins
* dman
* pbput/pbputs/pbget
- talked to Stephane Graber
* release
* release-build
* wifi-status
* errno
- currently in ubuntu-dev-tools, Tim Gardner of the kernel team said he'd put it somewhere in the kernel packages)
== Session Notes ==
- moreutils (Sometimes tools are rejected)
- Bikeshed: Orphanage where small utitlities are kept if rejected by moreutils.
- ubuntu-dev-tools - Only for Ubuntu Development
- wine has experience something similar, has a collection of scripts in a google code project, with many contributors, updated frequently
- Binary packages for groups of tools. (i.e. Wine Scripts, dev-tools, etc)
- pbput/pbputs/pbget - Port to python.
- Media convertion scripts also welcome.
- What about Aliases to certain commands?
- No dependencies. Other packages should break/replace bikeshed.
- scripts within bikeshed may depend on eachother though (and if they do should be in same subpackage)
- All executables in /usr/lib and not in /usr/bin?
- concern: taking valuable short name space (eg 1,2,3,4,5)
- somewhat alleviated by putting those into own package
- could just change names (awk1, awk2... or col1, col2... or acol or something)
- could put into its own path folder that wasn't priority
- Will it go into Debian?
- Will depend on who will maintain bikeshed.
- If Dustin doesn't have control over it, might not be a good idea to depend on Debian to get it into Ubuntu.
- No objections to have it in debian, if users, devs, etc, approve it or don't find any problem with it.
- To get new scripts, proposing a merge should be enough. Keep in mind the licensing.
- consider package description as well if we put your script into one of bikeshed's binary packages
== Actions ==
- ACTION: [] Investigate ISC license. http://
- ACTION: [] Add note "Do not depend on other packages"
- ACTION: [] Rename some of the tools (1 to ...), define standard ("at least 3 chars, name can't duplicate something in archive, name shouldn't be deliberately temporary")
- ACTION: [mvo] sponsor debian uploads of bikeshed now and into eternity
