[Mageia-dev] How will be the realese cycle?

Tux99 tux99-mga at uridium.org
Thu Oct 14 16:14:12 CEST 2010



Quote: Ahmad Samir wrote on Thu, 14 October 2010 16:00
>
> I've seen, too many times, trigger-happy packagers backporting
> packages that're not maintained by them (so they know it less than
> those package maintainer(s)), breaking those packages and annoying the
> maintainers of said packages. It's usually irresponsible to backport a
> package without taking that package maintainer's opinion into account.
> (an infamous example on that is gwibber being backported to 2010.1).

I agree it should be preferably the maintainer doing the backport, or he
should at least be consulted.
 
> New users who frequented the forums always got to know what backports
> are pretty fast. And bugzilla is the perfect system for asking for a
> backport, that worked pretty good.

The wast majority of 'normal' users never uses the forum.
Backports shouldn't be something that only users who frequent the forum
find out about.

> That's they way backports has always worked, no specific patches, just
> the latest cooker package pushed to backports "as is with no official
> support", that's reasonable, packagers shouldn't promise to support
> backports when they can't due to various reasons (time, effort.. etc).

But IMHO that should change in Mageia, we should promise support by the way
of timely updates, especially when security issues are present.

> > Backports shouldn't be second choice, it should be the default,
> > since that
> > would make Mageia stand out from other distros as being the distro
> > were
> > users get the latest versions of apps before any other major
> > distro
> > provides them.
> 
> Enabling them by default defies the purpose of having backports at
> all; it's not for new users, it's more for slightly experienced users
> or power users who want the latest versions of apps.

That's exactly the crucial bit that IMHO needs to change, backports are
very interesting for 'normal' users so we should make sure normal users
can use them.
Don't you see how attractive it is especially for 'normal' users to have
access to the latest versions all the time?
Sure, not everyone wants them, but by integrating the skip.list in the
update GUI we could keep 'conservative' users happy too.


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