[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout, round two

Samuel Verschelde stormi at laposte.net
Mon Nov 29 13:14:08 CET 2010


Le lundi 29 novembre 2010 12:46:22, andre999 a écrit :
> As already commented in previous posts, I would rather see this split 
> into 2 parts :
> 1) core = really core (or very useful) to a fully functional desktop or 
> server or developer system.
> Examples include packages for the kernel, usual Linux utilities and 
> development tools, drivers, drak* and associated tools, complete desktop 
> environments (such as Gnome, KDE, LXDE), and common applications such as 
> LibreOffice (successor to Go-Openoffice) and Firefox.
> 
>   This would essentially be a subset (most) of Mandriva main, with 
> possibly some from Mandriva contrib.  These packages may not depend on 
> packages in extra.
>   Every effort must be collectively made to ensure that packages in this 
> group are maintained.
> 
> and
> 
> 2) extra = supplementary packages which, if they break, will not affect 
> core.
>   This is essentially all (or least all maintained) of Mandriva contrib 
> and much of Mandriva main.
> Typical examples include calendar printing programs, poedit (for 
> translators), and games.
> 
> Extra would probably be much larger than main.  (After eliminating 
> non-functional non-maintained packages.)

I agree with andre999 on this point : the "everything in core" approach makes no distinction between packages which I can trust (for servers for example) and packages which I can't rely on.

It was said early that you just have to look at whether the package has a maintainer or not to make a distinction, but this is not sufficient. A maintainer can be very active in cauldron but not care about maintaining for stable releases. A package can have no maintainer but be actively supported in practice (by everybody in cauldron, by security team in stable releases).

The current main vs contrib approach in mandriva is very sensible. It has some (minor, to me) drawbacks, but when I install packages from main I *know* there will be security updates, bugfix updates, and a QA process that packages in contrib don't have. Do we plan to have no QA process at all in Mageia ? If we plan to have such processes, does the merge between core and extra make is efficient ? I guess we don't plan to have all packages (even maintained ones) equally supported with a full QA process (doesn't seem realistic) ?

If we define collectively what "core" contains, then we can ensure that every package there has :
- a maintainer who takes care of it in cauldron
- a maintainer who takes care of security and bugfix updates in stable release (maybe the same person, maybe not) 
- (when doable) a maintainer who takes care of backports for this package (maybe the same person, maybe not) 
- a QA team which will review changes on stable releases for these packages

Packages in core get the "QA approved" stamp whereas packages in extra get none.

Therefore I'm against the merge of core and extra.

Regards

Samuel Verschelde



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