[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout, round two

Romain d'Alverny rdalverny at gmail.com
Tue Nov 30 14:48:55 CET 2010


On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 13:29, Samuel Verschelde <stormi at laposte.net> wrote:
> What I'm saying is totally different :
>
> In the first case :
> - no one steps in to maintain it. We drop it.
>
> In the second case :
> - no one steps in to maintain it. Because we promised to support it, and because there are people who care about that (the QA Team Leader for example), we would *try very hard* to find a solution. this is a problem, we identify the problem, we try to solve it. Maybe we fail, but at least we try hard, because the package is on the "supported" list.

Ok, it's a degree of support management:
 - first case, dropping is automatic,
 - second case, we turn the red light on and try to organise around
this to find a "best effort" solution.

But, in the second case, relying exclusively on the community, for the
support promise to work, you have to show that you have either some
separate incentive, either a large enough community to grow the
chances for this to happen.

>> another solution : "we do no promises of supporting anything".
>
> This is a solution. Not mine however.

Not promising of something to happen is not a promise of this thing
not to happen.

Such a promise of support is much more sustainable if you have a
clear, identifiable incentive or reason or experience (for the people
you promise to) to keep it. There are differences between:
 * guaranteed,
 * trying very hard,
 * best effort,
 * good will,
 * nothing pretended

support promises.

> Let me present the idea differently. There are 2 levels of support :
>
> - top guaranteed support (a subset of packages) : those are packages your can rely on blindly, they'll be updated in a timely manner. Those are the packages the QA Team puts its limited resources on (doesn't mean the QA Team provides support, but they check that good support is provided). The maintainer is responsible for the package, but the QA Team is vigilant about them.
> - supported packages (every other package) : those are maintained packages, however the QA Team doesn't have to check them. It's up to the maintainer.
> - unsupported packages are dropped.
>
> So everything is supported, but there a special level of support for some critical components.

Just saying, but as packages support is to be distributed, we may as
well have commercial companies step around and manage this kind of
support:
 * within/through Mageia through their employees (so, it matches our
policies, that's the idea),
 * because it matches their activity/interest (they build the
software, they consult/sell/build around it).

To help thinking about that (in the future, because now we have
nothing to track/compare) we need to collect and report relevant data
about packages management experience (supported, not supported, number
of updates, maintainers, time to push an update, etc.) against a first
policy. So we can measure what happens and what can be reasonably
changed/expected in the future.

Romain


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