[Mageia-dev] RFC: Opening Backports (once again...)

[Thomas Backlund]

Now,

here comes the question about backports once again.

We are now 6+ months into Mageia 1, and we are nowhere closer to opening 
backports that we were at Mageia 1 release time.

Because of that there are 3rdparty repos popping up everywhere...,
something we hoped to avoid atleast partly when starting this project.

And at current rate we will probably release Mageia "infinity"
before backports is opened.


It has been delayed because of needed infrastructure changes,
something no-one have had time to do so far...

I know there is "only some coding missing" and "someone should
do it", buth truthfully there are only a few that knows the
code used in the buildsystem enough to actually make it happend,
and they are already othervise busy or overloaded...
(this is no rant against them, as all here are using their
  personal free time to help out)

And to be honest I dont see that changing anytime soon...


So here is a suggestion to get some value to our endusers:

we add a backports branch on svn

So packages for backports would use:

svn.mageia.org/packages/backports/1/<package>/{current,pristine,releases}

and allow that to be used for backports.

Using a separate branch is also a cleaner way of providing
backports, and makes it easy to separate changes needed only
for Cauldron (or backports).

--
Thomas