[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout, round two

Renaud MICHEL r.h.michel+mageia at gmail.com
Sat Nov 27 00:34:15 CET 2010


On samedi 27 novembre 2010 at 00:02, Maarten Vanraes wrote :
> C) if they are separate, they cannot be disabled by default, some stuff
> is  needed for stuff to work.

I guess you are talking about firmware here.
Maybe the installer could detect that a firmware is needed for some 
hardware, then it could either ask the user if he wants to enable the 
firmware repository, or automatically enable it.

> D) i have questions about noarch packages, will they be installed on
> both  trees? and if we have more archs later on, more and more? this
> seems a waste; except if we could hardlink them somehow. if not, we
> should just put them somewhere separate.

If the files are identical, they can be hard linked, and then the mirrors 
updates them with rsync -aH.
(by the way, the readme already ask for those options
http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/linux/Mageia/mirror.readme )
It is quite easy to make a script that will make those hard links "à 
posteriori" (you only need to compare files with identical names)

It could even be integrated into the build system (maybe it is already, I 
have no idea how it works), each time a noarch package is added to a 
repository it would check the corresponding repository for other arch if the 
same file is already present and is identical, and if so make a hard link 
instead of copying it.

> E) i understand games to be separate, but disabled by default?, i'm not
> sure i  agree with that. (we need to remember our target audience; stuff
> needs to work out-of the box)

This could also be decided at install time.
If the user choose the game section then the games repository is enabled and 
some task-game-* are selected to install various games.

> F) what is backports_testing? why can't that just be testing?

testing is for packages that will go to updates, backports_testing is for 
packages that will go to backports.
I think it is likely that some people will be willing to test updates 
candidate but don't want to end up with backports, so enabling only testing 
and not backports_testing.

If I remember correctly, there is currently (mdv2010.1 and previous) no 
testing stage for backported packages, and it was proposed during the 
discussion one month ago, that it would be good to have also a testing for 
backported packages.

-- 
Renaud Michel


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