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

andré andr55 at laposte.net
Thu Oct 21 04:48:06 CEST 2010


Tux99 a écrit :
>
>
> 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.
>    
I think that should be an explicit policy of Mageia.
>
>    
>> 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.
>    
True.  Although I suspect that they are more likely to use the forum 
than formally make a bug report.
>> 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.
>    
That can only change if we have more ressources.  At least at first, we 
risk to have somewhat less, without the  financial input from the 
commercial side that exists for Mandriva.
>>> 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.
>>      
Agreed.
> 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?
>    
I would expect that 'normal' users would be most concerned that the 
system just work.
The 'latest versions' is more a preoccupation of a minority of at least 
moderately experienced users, who probably also like trying out all 
sorts of new software.
Not at all typical of the population in general, but admittedly more 
common among Linux users.

> Sure, not everyone wants them, but by integrating the skip.list in the
> update GUI we could keep 'conservative' users happy too
That would certainly help, and not just for 'conservative' users.  Often 
a particular package only has problems on some systems.  A more readily 
accessible skip.list blacklist would make it easier to avoid accidently 
re-installing a package that didn't work as expected the first time, for 
whatever reason.

- André (andre999)


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