[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout, round two

Michael scherer misc at zarb.org
Sun Nov 28 18:50:28 CET 2010


On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 11:16:57PM +0100, Maarten Vanraes wrote:
> Op zaterdag 27 november 2010 22:07:43 schreef Michael scherer:
> > On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 08:23:59PM +0200, Thomas Backlund wrote:
> > > Jerome Quelin skrev 27.11.2010 19:11:
> > > >On 10/11/27 17:59 +0100, Maarten Vanraes wrote:
> > > >and, more importantly: what is the advantage? that is, what does that
> > > >bring you, except more admin?
> > > 
> > > QA!
> > > and enduser satisfaction.
> > > 
> > > Just take a look on many bugreports in MDV Bugzilla.
> > > If the report is against a nomaintainer@ package, currently Triage
> > > pretty much only can state "thanks for your report, but since it has
> > > no maintainer, nothing will probably happend" wich is not good answer
> > > for a person that have taken the time to report a bug.
> > 
> > Then why don't we either :
> > - decide that non maintened package must be taken care by trainee, as
> > part of the training
> > - decide to clean them.
> 
> that's a great idea, we need more trainees! but of course, we can't do that 
> with all 5000+ unmaintained packages...
> 
> is there a way to get rpm usage stats from those unmaintained packages.

No. We can only get download stats from mirrors. While it may be biased toward 
some geographical preference ( ie, I doubt many people download locale-zh 
from distrib-coffee ), it can give at least some ideas. Nothing precise, but
still better than random.

> > > By having the /extra/ disabled by default, and a popup notifying the
> > > user if he enables it that the packages are "unmaintained" he knows
> > > he's "on his own"
> > 
> > That's already what the GPL say, basically :)
> > ( you have no garantee of anything ).
> > 
> > Yet, I fail to see what benefit it does really bring to users. Most of them
> > will enable the media ( because some people enable everything ), will
> > forget the message ( because we always forget popup, thanks
> > to endless abuse of such popup ),
> > and the only benefit is that we could tell "we told you". Not really
> > satisfying, and if I was a user, it would not really please me, nor
> > inspire confidence.
> 
> some would, but that they'd also enable testing, backports, debug, etc... if 
> they really do so, it's kind of their own fault. i don't think the majority 
> does that. the majority leaves it at default.

And so the majority will say "$distro is bad because there is not enough software".

> The thing is that you have no guarantee, but the thing is, with mdv, there's 
> too much packages that just don't work; you install it, you click in the menu 
> and nothing happens because it doesn't work. 

So too much is 10%, more ?

> same thing and one of them is in extra; then i get only one, if i can't find 
> any, i can enable the searching in extra and try to find a package that works.
> 
> that's why i personally would prefer to leave these off by default.
>
> > We could avoid adding a media by merging this media with core,
> > and show the popup when a user install a package without maintainer,
> > telling either "beware, this package is currently marked as not maintained,
> > and may be buggy. We will try to do what we can to help in this case, but
> > no one is officialy in charge" or "we are seeking help on taking care of
> > this package, if you use it often, please register on $URL"
> 
> this popup will get ignored too; and persons who are perfectly aware of it, 
> will grow irritated.

Then, we can do a single "do not ask me again", or just show it once ?

> 
> futhermore: (no separate extra)
>  - huge amount of packages (think of the mirrors)

mirror space is taken with extra or core. So the argument do not stand much.
Now, this would be a arguent for simply erasing those unmaintained packages.

>  - huge hdlists

Indeed. But if we want to have people be able to search
inside like you said you would, this would still be downloaded, be used ( so in memory )
and on the mirror. So that's also not much a good reason.
( however, if we remove them... )

-- 
Michael Scherer


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