[Mageia-dev] Mirror layout, round two

[nicolas vigier]

On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, Samuel Verschelde wrote:

> 
> Indeed, however it helps showing that there's a set of packages which is supported, and another one which is only on behalf of the maintainer. In a community driven distribution, this distinction may remains valid : some packages are officially supported by the distribution, others may or may not be, depending on the maintainer (or lack of maintainer).

We don't need separate medias to show that there are two sets of
packages, supported and unsupported. I think using separate medias adds
useless complexity. We could for instance provide a file on api.mageia.org
containing the list of officially supported packages. It would also have
other advantages :
 - You can see how many unsupported packages and which ones are installed
   on your system. This is not possible with main/contrib, if you enabled
   contrib temporarly to install a few packages.
 - You can change the package status (supported/unsupported) after the
   release, if needed.
 - Some packages can have a different support time. On Mandriva, "Base
   system & components" was supported longer, but it was not clear which
   packages were part of this.
 - This file could also list known security issues for unsupported
   and supported packages.
 - Some packages have a lot of optional plugins, and we build them all,
   adding a lot of build requires. With main/contrib separation we need
   to add all the build dependencies to main, even if most of them are
   not runtime dependencies.