[Mageia-dev] Various proposals around backports and other media management

[Samuel Verschelde]

Le mercredi 6 octobre 2010 00:06:41, Buchan Milne a écrit :
> 
> On Tuesday, 5 October 2010 19:46:45 Samuel Verschelde wrote:
> > - a section on the mageia website dedicated to package updates : what's new
> > in security/bugfix updates, what's new in backports (aka version updates),
> > ... with screen captures, description of what changed in this version,
> > links to upstream websites, comments from users, focus on some
> > applications... 
> 
> Please take into consideration features that might be beneficial to package 
> maintainers as well. If you haven't yet, please look at e.g. Youri project, 
> Sophie etc.

The one I'm talking about would be primarily geared towards end-users. However, why not indeed share efforts between packager's needs and user's needs. Some are common, others aren't. With a clever architecture, this is attainable. What about a unique back-end, but 2 different frontends ?

> 
> RSS feed or use of twitter by build system may be useful ....

Indeed. I thought about them but forgot to write them down.

> > - (the biggest part, but the one with most long term benefits I hope) add
> > metadata to media to make urpmi more media-aware. Today, rpmdrake detects
> > backports because the backports media have "backports" in their name.
> > That's a (useful) hack, but we could do better. One solution could be to
> > give metadata to each media : * release vs updates vs backports
> >  * testing vs stable
> >  * debug vs non-debug
> > Combination of these "tags" would give the following media :
> >     * main release (just like today's media)
> >     * main updates
> >     * main updates testing : for update candidates, this is our current
> > "main testing" media * main backports
> >     * main backports testing : for backports candidates (as someone who
> > frequently does backports, I sometimes feel the lack for it) 
> 
> As long as it doesn't take the focus off the development release. In Mandriva, 
> I think there were some uploads to backports before the upload to cooker, 
> which can cause problems for users if not corrected.

Indeed. I think that the current policy already tries to enforce that. Those uploads to backports before upload to cooker were mistakes.
I don't think that this media structure would change many things in the way that we packagers work, however. Benefits should be mainly for users.

Samuel