Re: I'd like to add and mantain a new pacakge: nix

["Lee D. Rothstein" <lee at veritech dot com>]

Marc Weber wrote:

> I've read the "how to contribute a new package" on the faq and
> started writing the cygport file.
> It was easy.
>
> The distfiles which I've created this way can be found on
> http://mawercer.de/dist
>
> Which is the recommended way of testing them?
> tar xfj -C / nix*.tar.bz2 ?
>
> Sincerly
> Marc Weber

I am totally unqualified to answer your questions. However, I did
look at elements of your package components because I am curious
about being a Cygwin developer/maintainer, and I have been
struggling for some time to figure out how to improved Cygwin/GNU
documentation/help.

With that fan-less-fare (;-)), I make the following observations:

* The hint file is not complete and appears to be some kind of
  gag?
 
* It would be quite helpful, if there was a "NIX Intro" 'man' page
  that gave the function of the package that I could only find
  described in the Cygport file. This page would also point out
  the components of the package much the same way that 'man perl'
  does, but on the relatively smaller scale of 'nix'.
 
* It would also be helpful, if the '.TH' description for each
  man page was more functionally descriptive.
 
* I believe this description is what goes into the 'whatis'
  database that is used by both 'whatis' and 'apropos', and
  that, in particular, is what makes the two above points
  important, IMHO. (It is this oversight which annoys me about
  the NetPBM package, for example.)
 
* I believe that such changes would make your package more
  accessible, and therefore more popular, but, as I've already
  said, I'm unqualified to judge.

Having made all the criticisms, I must say that I was overjoyed
to see the extent of the 'man' pages.

(My personal belief is that 'info' causes cancer in chickens, and
no reason to involve these sacrificial birds in the GNUish
documentation wars. ;-) )

Were you intending your package manager to be used for
maintaining parallel Cygwin 1.5/1.7 configurations?



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